Good post! This is something I've been pondering myself. I see myself as a designer who programs (since there arent any programmers that can design ;) and the benefits of being well-versed in both the design and actual implementation have been tremendous. I've worked with many programmers who think they can design and while they show various adeptitude in designing interfaces it's very rare to find anyone delving deeper into the interaction issuesss. Thinking about what kind of problems the user *really* want to solve and thinking about personas rather than "the user". This often leads to spending lots of time and energy solving the wrong problem, things like designing a form rather than questioning if the form is necessary. Programmers also have a tendancy to underestimate the importance of the minor details and overestimating the users (they can be really "stupid" sometimes)
Designers on the other hand suffer from their lack of technical expertise. Advanced algoritms, controls and a deep knowledge of the underlying data and systems can be a great inspiration for features and interfaces that are truly useful. If you're not aware of the controls existence or what data there is you'll never get there. Another important factor is knowledge of the framework your working with. Usually when programming interfaces you have some kind of UI library and/or framework that has features and controls, if you are not aware of all the possibilities of that framework you won't be able to make use of them. In theory you shouldn't shape your solution based on what framework you're designing it in but rather simply design and then program the best custom interface. In reality however it's efficient to do so, rather you pick the best (hopefully) framework and tool for the task and go from there. You might design some custom control if it's extremely important but it's costly and takes time. That's why I think the Designer who programs have great advantage over when the role is split. Not only does he knows more that can improve design, he also implement it and make sure it gets done right. You can do much faster iterations of a solution if you yourself can design something and quickly implement it without having to synchronize a whole team. The downside is that the designer programmer is extremely hard to find and demands a lot from that role. Most designers don't have the time and inclination to be really good programmers, and most programmers don't have the proper mindset and interest to become great designers best regards -- Mattias Konradsson ________________________________________________________________ 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
