Due to this thread, I decided to just directly ask the developers I work with what they thought. Since I work so closely with them daily, if there's a doubt or question they just ask me. I realize that in larger organizations, there is more isolation between groups so the documents have to speak for themselves. Thus I also asked my developer friend at Yahoo for that perspective. For the most part, annotated wireframes, concise written explanations, and a complete set of visual designs is sufficient for most things. Unless the interaction is completely new or unusual, the (good) developers know how to build common UI elements (think typical suburban home vs. Gehry building).
However, I did find that one developer preferred if everything was spelled out in a sort of a tech. spec list fashion (hex colors, fonts sizes, dimensions) for the visual stuff. While another preferred to ignore those indications and go into the PSD files and measure it himself. The reason for the latter being that the direct translation of those specs aren't perfect when implemented in code, so he is doing a semantic translation. This is probably why it's important to have all of these different document forms saying the same thing differently. Different developers work in different ways just like everybody else. As long as the end results are what I planned, I don't really care too much about their particular process for getting there. FYI, I export all my spec docs to Wiki-style HTML after writing them in VoodooPad. I try to indicate whenever things are being shared between web pages so the developer doesn't start building the same thing twice. I also try to include as many "See: [link]" and other crosslinks so the developers don't have to poke around the document to find relevant information. It's all in one huge document with links from page to related page. I'll continue to do my informal interviewing of developers and report if I find anything interesting. -Dan On Nov 2, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Bruno Figueiredo wrote: > 1) We need a standardized visual language so that whenever we change > jobs we don't need to learn yet another way to document things. > Architects have their own visual language and it's consistent from > the US to Japan. Any engineer or builder can pick up an architect's > drawing and start building straight-away. ________________________________________________________________ *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://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
