What you describe is pretty much the norm for me. Technology has always affected the design, and it seems your situation is pretty typical, in my experience. When given a choice and no external pressure, developers will use the technology that makes their lives easiest, and everything (bar none, except salary decreases) flows from that one decision. I've been one, so that was my mindset, then.
I'm doing something very similar right now, except I have the dubious honor of being able to design the whole application, and pre-determine the architecture (technology) we'll be using. I hope to _blank_ I won't end up coding the whole thing, too, but it's an extremely difficult place to be, regardless. I'm designing just like you are, disregarding the perceived technical limits in favor of features that optimize our main processes. On the other hand, I have to make sure whatever architecture we use will allow for all of the usable components we need. To that end, I'm planning to use an open source portal platform with portlets that can take various technologies (including plain HTML, Ajax, Java, NetBeans or JRuby). That way, whichever developer we hire for this thing will be able to choose from a range of technologies, without drastically affecting the design. I know very little about Flex, or Silverlight, or some of the "hotter" products on the market...my critical path is finding someone with good basic development skills, who can work with me to grow into these new areas as they mature. I fully realize whoever I hire is going to have very strong opinions one way or the other. In a perfect world, the technology should have no effect on the design. In the real world, it does. Don't think you can change that, but you could have designed your system to the constraints of a platform you know is up to the task, and then tell the developers they have to use that technology. It's probably too late for that (and I don't think you'd get a word in afterwards, with all the laughing and giggling going on). Perhaps the best you can do now is counter their "we can't do that because it's impossible" arguments with some research on your own, proving the opposite. If you provide code examples showing exactly what you want, you might win some friends quickly (assuming they're normal and appreciate people who pitch in). One of the caveats I would add...I have noticed over the years that a good design sometimes must change/conform to *what users expect of that technology*. Even though something is technically possible in a certain medium, that doesn't mean you should violate what users expect from that technology for your design vision. I'm thinking of modal web page windows, which prevent you clicking the screen behind them. Not that you should never use them, but I've never seen a good reason to, and have never found users in a study who appreciated them. Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Grady Kelly Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 4:26 PM To: IXDA list Subject: [IxDA Discuss] What comes first, the Design or the Technology ... What are the opinions here about what comes first, the Design or the Technology? I am currently designing a web application from an existing windows application. No decision had been made at the time as far as the technology to be used, only that it would be a web application. So I designed like I normally do, I composite/mock up designs in Fireworks, and then build the high fidelity prototypes with xhtml/css/javascript. We have been showing our prototypes to users and have received a lot of great feedback and approval. Development has now decided to use Adobe Flex for the front end. Their reasoning was biased towards developers, easier to code, MVC, strictly typed, etc. My favorite was "The DOM breaks all the time, and we can't work with it." The developers tried to create my design in Flex. It was close in concepts, but not near close to what I initially produced. My initial thought was, maybe I should design in Flex, and make the Flex UI look like what I have designed. But I am thinking more that users and the design should drive the application and not development and what makes things easier for them. Development is still making decisions about the application with comments like, "it makes it easier for us to code" instead of "if we take a few more days, we can use JSON and improve performance by 25%." So what should come first? The design or the technology? Should one conform to the other? Should the design break for development? Has anyone else had this experience? Should the user come first? or the developer? Or am I just out of my mind? ;o) Thanks in advance! Grady Kelly [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gradykelly.com ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
