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: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.)