Developer Question
Out of context: Reply #10
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- vaxorcist0
Short answer : involve developer earlier, have some respect on both sides, and do real prototype thinking before committing to design that has to be changed alot at the last minute.
Developers often see projects like an iceberg, that which matters to them is underwater, invisible to everyone else who's fixated on what they can see, much of which is not nearly as potentially devastating as that which is invisible, like a corrupted database of bad e-commerce transactions,etc.
Process and culture have to change bigtime.
Many agencies still use the infamous waterfall method: where each step is approved and set in stone before handed downwards, so the designer does PSD's which are then handed to developer to css-ify and "add functionality."
Sounds good, as it "should" prevent changes, as the design has been "hammered down and approved" before it's sent to developer...
But....this is sometimes project suicide, as things look farther along than they are, client thinks things are "mostly done" somebody randomly offers some new ideas... and often there are some surprise "can't get there from here" moments when earlier assumptions have to be re-examined, some business requirement may have been sidelined, etc...
These earlier assumptions are what the developer based a large, invisible codebase on, so a designer may be saying "can you put this here and move that to this other page" but a developer may hear "can you make this submarine into a flying minibus with 8 wheels by tomorrow morning?!?"
This leads to developer burnout....
One way out of all this is agile development, but it's more likely to be used on projects where clients are not so nervous, where people are willing to let prototyping take a while, where people are capable of abstract thinking, and things may work in a different set of directions: Developers and IA's think of what has to be done, and designers then skin and re-skin a front end, with clearly determined pageflow. This does bring the designer in towards the end, not the beginning, and is too much of a cultural shift for most design-oriented agencies, but it may be a good alternative for applications where you're doing something really different from what's been done before.