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

How about a link between developers and users?

[Morgaine]

"The customer is always right" we hear, and indeed when the silly crud and newbie chaff is separated out, there is often good substance and insight coming from the more knowledgeable users, sometimes even terrific suggestions.

Yet, how many companies actually have a strong official link between users and developers, taking user suggestions and pinning them up visibly as official input to the works process, duly accredited? Almost none, in my experience. The trend seems to be to have a Customer Relations officer whose job is to answer obvious questions from users and to keep fanboys happy, and little else. If a requested feature is implemented, it appears by a form of magic as a fait acomplit; the process of design, development and testing is certainly is not made visible, in general.

This area could be improved a lot in the corporate world!

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.

Re:How about a link between developers and users?

[theshowmecanuck]

Customer's feedback should be listened to, and I bet even you do it. The problem is, in a corporate environment, a developer's work has far too many end users and he/she cannot possibly take in all the feedback. That is why they have requirements and design teams between them and the customer. They filter the feedback/feature requrests and figure out what can possibly fit. My impression is that it is the communication between the designer and developer in this process that they are trying to improve so that the developer doesn't just receive orders from above that are technically difficult to achieve. i.e. having an idea of what the code is doing can help streamline and improve the design. I have seen this done in several places where the requirements person or designer does not program, but understands through close relations with the developers how the code is implemented. They can then understand what is sensible and even do-able when requirements are added and design is taking place.

Since you are a 'one man show' you probably do this intrinsically.

Re:Missing Tool: Aluminum Softball Bat

[Chelloveck]

It remains the only effective means of convincing some developers that they are *NOT* designers in the first place.

There have been many a time when I've wanted to bludgeon the designer with that same bat. Like, would it kill them to use a consistent naming convention? Or keep an indexed table in the same order from version to version? Or, the most difficult concept I've ever had to get across -- "I don't care if those two curves look coincident on your monitor. They're on different layers [in Illustrator] and they're slightly different. The gap between them will be visible in the product!"

I won't call the designers lazy or stupid. They're not. But they do have a tendency to be overly creative in areas where discipline is called for. (Just like developers have a tendency to be unimaginative in the realm of graphic design.)

Re:Designers should learn

[mooingyak]

Agree completely. I do mostly design work now, though primarily coded in the past. I have insisted (and my CTO agrees, so I don't exactly have to fight about it) that on at least some of the projects I design I take a break from the design work and do some coding along side the developers. Sometimes you pick up some things from developers that you hadn't known were possible. Sometimes your design is bad and it becomes painfully clear when you start trying to implement. All in all I think participating in the coding makes the quality of design work better.

We recently interviewed a candidate for one of our design positions, and in the interview he refused to answer a question about the level of detail of his UNIX knowledge (general, vague UNIXish questions, hadn't gotten to any kind of precision yet) on the grounds that it was irrelevant to the work he'd be doing. I don't know if it was a philosophical objection or if he was trying to cover for the fact that he didn't know anything, but his stance guaranteed he wouldn't get the job.

This is funny

[Spiked_Three]

I get a real kick out of reading some of the comments. Some people, programmers for the most part I assume just don't get it.

What would TV commercials be like if they all were written and produced by software programmers? It would be incredibly ugly and boring.

Do the people that make commercials think them out, write out a script and then turn it over to a programmer to produce? NO. They have tools like Adobe After Effects and Final Cut (and other high end stuff most people here never heard of).

I have not looked in depth at the flash approach, but I am investing a lot of time becoming as smart as I can at the Microsoft approach (XAML). This is a huge change in the way applications can be written; allowing designers to declaratively specify the User Interface. It might not apply to every single application out there, but in the ones where it makes sense, your application can become as creative and appealing as a super bowl commercial. Microsoft is giving the designers After Affect like tools to create their designs and they are not dependent on the developer to make it happen. And, it can happen in parallel. It does not need to be a back and forth effort as it currently is.

Programmers need to remember that it is not just programmers who use computers anymore. I know this is less true with the Slashdot crowd, but the computer illiterate user population has overtaken us quite a few years ago. Applications need to be visually appealing to people who are not computer professionals - changing the terminal font family and size is no longer enough. For years a lot of this crowd has talked about how much better the OS X interface is - well this is an effort to get rid of the OS UI limits and leave it up to the designers. Yes, we could have always done that with code, but now we are putting high end tools, like After Effects, in the hands of the UI designer and saying, "Let's see what you can come up with." Some will fail, and some will be great.

The biggest problem I see in this is I'm still stuck with clients who think every app should be web based. Microsoft's approach to web apps is the same as the previously failed Java web app approach - the browser simply hosts a local application. (I'm not saying the Java approach was bad or wrong, just that it has ZERO adoption and momentum). I don't have a lot of faith that web based XAML will do any better than web based Java applets (not script) did.