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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."
"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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
...I still have no idea what its point is.
Are they working on the basis that companies have graphics designers who work out the visual appearance, and programmmers who write the scripts to update the content in whatever way, and these two roles are independent?
In my experience, that rarely happens, just as it rarely happens for desktop apps that there's someone who designs the user interface, and then there are guys who write the code behind it. Perhaps for very large projects in very large companies this is more common, but certainly not in smaller outfits IME.
Even if the larger companies want to put more effort into the presentation/usability aspects of their web sites, how is this any different to the problems of UI design for desktop apps that we've been working on for years? Just get the guys who are experts in graphic design, accessibility, and so on to put together the concepts and work out the HTML, CSS and graphics they want to use. Then give the specs and prototypes to the programming team to insert their code into them. This idea is not difficult to implement for even the largest desktop applications, and I don't see why the fact that the presentation medium is a web page makes any difference.
Then again, I still code up my pages using text editors and scripted tools rather than all these funky "web design" applications, and I only maintain a few hundred pages with thousands of hits per day single-handed and in my spare time, so I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why don't they let the developers do the design? What's *not* intuitative about
>_
?!
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It remains the only effective means of convincing some developers that they are *NOT* designers in the first place.
"Art? Design? C'mon, I've mastered AJAX, XHTML, JAVA, JavaScript, ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, PERL, and I own the only remaining data glove on the East Coast, what do I need art for? See, it's got a template... I'll just change the colors... try and find out the client's favorite color... hell, I've been building websites since '93, and I'm no artist... and I used vi... still use vi, heh... look here, I've got a CD full of clipart, we can use one of these... pic of an Asian chick on the phone, yeah, this'll work fine... designers? gimme a break... look, here's a website with cool fonts we can download, I'll download a bunch, client'll love 'em, never seen anything like 'em... talk to legal, see if we can get the rights to "Dark Side of the Moon," it'll be cool, see, when you first come to the client's site, Floyd's "Money" will start playing. Get it? Damn! I'm good! friggin' designers, who needs a designer, just make everything more complex, take all the credit, man..."
Discussing design and development always suffers from the various definitions people attribute to those roles. At the extreme end, designers are seen as graphic designers responsible for surface styling, 'skins', while the developers are expected to be socially incompetent eccentrics who value only code elegance.
That's just stupid, there's a huge gap there where no-one is looking at interaction design.
Any product still ends up with a design - a form - whether there is a dedicated designer or not. How well that product then fares from its users' point of view should be used to assess the quality of the design.
In my opinion, it's fair to assume a designer being the person in charge of the end user's experience, the individual using the product. Can they do what they set out to do? Are they happy using the product? A designer must absolutely be able to justify the rationale of user-beneficial design decisions to others, who may not be on speaking terms with the actual end user, like developer and marketing types.
And hopefully they do that way before a single line of code is written.
That's my definition of a designer.
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.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Those a little confused about the separation of concerns between designers and developers should read the following blog entry from one of the MS Expression developers. Designers. Whatever. Just read it:
t s-evolution.html
http://lostgarden.com/2006/02/software-developmen
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Is hard for programmers to help users. Is also a bad idea to be the developper AND the tester. And this why we have teams. One guy can be a programmer, other guy tester, and another do the marketing/media stuff. And thats Ok. The problem here are tiny teams with tons of programmers, but not tester or not marketers. You really need people that think like clients, and is not a programmer.
-Woof woof woof!
no way.