[Sigia-l] Designers and Developers

[Russ Unger]

> Designers won't have to build/implement, developers won't 
> have to design. So
> I don't see where the problem is. Designers have to 
> understand the technical
> ramifications of their design choices. That's very different 
> than saying,
> designers have to be good programmers. They'll never have to 
> write code.

I couldn't disagree with you less.  To this day, I know a multitude of
designers who, by their own rights, are very, very good at their craft,
but beyond utilzing an external tool to help them build out a web
design, they can't work a line of HTML code (keyword: code).  I myself
have designed UI's for VB applications, and by simply reviewing the
Windows User Experience Book and several other applications written in
VB, digesting the Business Requirements and trapsing through Use Case
after Use Case, everything became much more clear to me when I sat down
with Visual Basic itself, along with a developer to explain a lot of the
basics, and then I started to crank out my own POCs that really helped
me understand just "how" things worked.

To say that a designer would never have to write code would be, to me,
fairly ridiculous.  A designer absolutely NEEDS to know enough about the
tools that their designs are being deployed with to be dangerous.  Next
week I'm attending a training class that a lot of our developers are
going to be involved in for a major portal application.  I can, without
the shadow of a doubt, tell you that this is going to be a very positive
experience for everyone.  Viewing a demo, reading a document simply is
not enough to be able to grasp capabilities that are in play, and
without some degree of knowledge as to how these things work, how could
an IA, a designer, ever hope to direct someone else in what the best
methods for performing an action are?

Conversely, a developer shouldn't have to know how to design, however,
they should be every bit as familiar with the capabilities and
limitations around some of the items they are going to implement.  A
spinner box should mean the same to a designer as it does to a
developer, and a designer should understand why it would be pointless to
have checkboxes that behave like radio buttons.  A developer shouldn't
be forced to pick colors out of the air, but they should understand what
the colors are in use in an application and what underlying meaning
those may have--something that should be provided to them by a designer,
but should also be somewhat "understood" that you don't just arbitrarily
create new colors.