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?

[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.

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.

Missing Tool: Aluminum Softball Bat

[RobotRunAmok]

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..."

Re:Missing Tool: Aluminum Softball Bat

[gEvil (beta)]

I think I've been to that website.

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: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.