[Sigia-l] Designers and Developers

[Listera]

John Fullerton:
>> why Developers shouldn't be in the design business
> I'd like to hear more.

After nearly two decades of designing *and* developing every imaginable kind
of app from standalone to interactive to client/server to web with a price
tag from four to seven digits, in small and large settings, I've come to
this simple conclusion: "design by committee" sucks.

For evidence, one need not go any further than a cursory survey of
user-facing open source apps. Strong leadership is a sine qua non of good
design.

But who will lead? Today, it's the developers. The vast majority of
apps/sites out there are driven by developers. Why? Because they can. They
can because project owners/managers believe developers are vital to
development and deployment in a way designers are not.

Common procedure is for developers to select a product/platform/language/IDE
long before design is even considered. Even today, design is something you
"skin" over and, as such, is often skin deep. Architecture, navigation,
interaction, branding and other aspects of user experience are usually for
version 2.0, *after* they are shown to be issues. Oddly, I get paid to solve
these problems, but my goal is to avoid the post-deployment surgery as a
business practice. Hence, my crusade.

So how do we get there?

1.  Designers have to know much more about the technical ramifications of
their design choices.

Why? Because if they don't, they will continue to be dictated by developers.
Too much to ask of designers? Not at all.

We've seen this happen with print design. About a decade ago, most
designers, art directors, illustrators or typographers couldn't tell a mouse
from a rodent. Today, that's clearly no longer the case. Just a few years
ago many designers took pride in not knowing anything about technical
aspects of their profession even when designing for online products. Today,
I don't think you can get a decent web designer job without knowing HTML
and/or XML, ASP, etc. I expect this trend to slowly expand into middleware
as well. There's, after all, no point in designing stuff that's not
efficient, scalable, maintainable, etc.

2.  Prototyping tools have to become dramatically better.