On 22 Oct 2007, at 13:12, Peter Boersma wrote: > Adrian wrote: > > Personally I would expect the developers to just refine, rather than > > rewrite. [..] What [functional designers/developers?] do need to > do is take > > the domain concepts form the IxD/UX-oriented documents and > understand > > them well enough to embody them in the code. > > What form do these refinements and understandings take? This is an excerpt of something I posted over on agile-usabilty last year... hopefully it illustrates the sort of thing I'm talking about.
-- [...] a workflow I designed that always had one "happy path" from each stage - the route that most users would follow. This was highlighted in the visual appearance of each page of the workflow. The "happy path" button was a different colour and size, and always appeared before any buttons on the page on the right hand side. Now - we already had a system for implementing basic HTML workflows (a little state transition network glued to some basic templating). The developers could have just implemented workflows with a "happy path" using this, styling the default-route buttons appropriately. The problem with doing this is that none of the design concepts of the "happy path" route end up in the code. Later on somebody could implement pages with multiple "happy path" buttons, or ones that are in the wrong position, or pages with no default route. So instead we subclass the state transition code and add the HappyPath concept. We make sure that it's impossible to instantiate an instance of a workflow that has pages with multiple happy paths, or no happy path at all. We subclass the template code so that happy path buttons are automatically styled appropriately and are only permitted in certain areas of the page layout. We even make the CSS for the "happy path" button linked to an id rather than a class so it's impossible to have more than one on a page. -- So we're taking a IxD design concept (the "happy path" + button + location) and refining it a little bit more so we can make it an explicit concept in the code. Make sense? Cheers, Adrian ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
