The New Link Between Designer and Developer

Scott Kinder writes "Ryan Stewart of ZDNet discusses the importance of the workflow between designers and developers. Both Adobe and Microsoft have a lot at stake in their respective software projects. Given how important experience is in making software, ensuring that it is easy for designers and developers to work together is more important than ever." From the article: "The key here is going to be the workflow between designers and developers and making sure that the tools support both types of content creators. Creating world class RIAs simply will not be possible without an efficient workflow between the two areas. Adobe has focused a lot on incorporating Adobe and Macromedia products, making sure that designers can easily move between both companies software. But they haven't quite perfected the designer/developer workflow, and I think Microsoft has a bit of a head start here. The Expression Suite seems built from the ground up to work well with their developer tools. The question will be whether or not designers will use these new tools."

Comments

Ideological claptrap

[Savage-Rabbit]

In my experience, designers are lazy f***ers. Integration software is useless. Get them to draw up a design and pass it along to the coders where they can deal with integrating it. Then the designer can get on with going back to sleep.

This idea of a design passing between coders and designers frequently and being modified as they go is idealogical claptrap. Get the design done right first time and then have the designer go back to the hole where they came from.

Nice flame troll, not very subtle though. Cooperation always results in a better product than if people each sit in their own corner and only talk when the project is in danger of being derailed. This guy seems to be talking about interaction between (web)designers and (web)developers but planning and design in general, even if we are only talking about the design and structure of the software code it self, is something that is completely missing in a lot of coding projects. I wish I had a penny for every badly planned, badly designed and as a result bug ridden and semi useless block of Java, C#, C and C++ code I have had to rewrite because the original coders didn't take the trouble to apply fundamental software design principles like layer abstraction, code re-use and modularization to their projects.

Re:I've R'd TFA and...

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Then give the specs and prototypes to the programming team to insert their code into them.

I've just seen to many cases of everybody wants a slightly different look/feel that I don't believe in any "prototype" being what will eventually be wanted. Thus developers should never "code" what the GUI will look like. Devleopers should implement a framework which seperates function from presentation and give designers the tools to allow them to completely change the design without having to recompile or touch a single line of code.

There are so many amazing tools and code examples about this type of application "skinning" that its really VERY easy to at least offer some basic functionality in this respect. In fact there are a number for 3-rd party controls which support this type of application "styling" without the developers even having to think about it or add a single line of code depending how far they want to go with it.

Obviously, this flexibility isn't important in all applications but for any application that gets distributed (not just an in-house application) I think there should at least be a serious look into offering this.

Re:How about a link between developers and users?

[Timesprout]

On the FOSS side of things of course, we have merging of designer/developers and users, so the issue is somewhat irrelevant. We can still improve our communications and documentation *a lot* though.

You must be joking. Most companies _have_ to pander to their customers. They dont make money otherwise. Even MS have gone to astonishing lengths to support their customers. OSS tends to utterly ignore the mainstream user which is why many mainstream users would rather steal a copy of windows than use OSS. Report a bug and be told to fuck off thats intended behaviour/user error, request a feature and be told to fuck off its a stupid request, ask for help and be told to fuck off and read the documentation, point out there is no documentation and be told to just fuck off. Think about that for a few mins and tell me if you can see a problem.