01-31 Involving a designer from the get-go: smart!
At Adaptive Path's blog (link via Webreakstuff), Jeffrey Veen interviews the director of user experience at Google, who says (with a lot of leading from Veen) that Google is semi-unique in that they have a designer present at every stage of the application design process. That's really awesome of Google I suppose, but I realized it's not that impressive to me because we've been doing things that way for a while now. And I can't imagine how you could come up with a decent product if you didn't do things that way. Trying to dress up an "un-designed" interface is like tossing an aftermarket spoiler onto the back of a compact car.
Both Blogsmith and Emurse had a designer present during the early stages, and whether that designer was me (in this case, yes) or someone else, the end results benefit greatly. It also helps, of course, that we have experience-minded programmers rather than what you might think of as traditional software engineers. When Gavin sees something that needs work but doesn't have a specific problem in mind, he's fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." That probably sums up why a designer is needed in application work.
Both Blogsmith and Emurse had a designer present during the early stages, and whether that designer was me (in this case, yes) or someone else, the end results benefit greatly. It also helps, of course, that we have experience-minded programmers rather than what you might think of as traditional software engineers. When Gavin sees something that needs work but doesn't have a specific problem in mind, he's fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." That probably sums up why a designer is needed in application work.
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