Achieving designer – developer collaboration and XAML (1/3)
Collaboration between designers and developers is always great topic to write about. I believe that for the first time that kind of collaboration is possible to full extent and it is possible today. Key element for enabling this is XAML – eXtensible Application Markup Language aka Holy Grail of designer – developer collaboration.
Providing users with application that works well, that is full with features and well-coded is something that we are taking for granted these days. But still there is one aspect of development in its broadest sense of word that is still being neglected. You already guessed it – it’s user experience (UX). While almost every software dev. company will gladly acknowledge that UX is extremely important and is key driver, just a handful of them will really embrace UX in its full sense. Why is that? The answer, I believe, is not very simple and reasons for having attitude like that are various. Idea of this post is to try to share my feeling that now, when we have XAML and tools such are those in Expression Studio, UX can be fully embraced and by saying that I am trying to tell that key missing element was lack of full collaboration between designers and developers – or if you want it – lack of tool / technology support for that kind of collaboration.
So, how do we create great computer program, service or operating system? Even if we are not able to answer this question easily, great software is generally easily recognizable on market and at the end user. Business of software today is not a simple thing and includes number of factors. Users, for example, firstly see user interface and its esthetics (or lack of the one.). Then there is content, functionality, responsiveness… It would be very challenging to list each and every factor that’s is affecting and shaping our experience while interacting with applicaton and it is also easy to see that developers (including a tester or two) are not neraly enough for development of high quality software. Product team today is not limited to those traditional roles – it is being expaneded and becoming almost interdisciplinary in its actions and philosophy. Software architect, project manager, designer – and while we probably can agree that first two roles have already earned their place in product teams, there are still some preconceptions around the role of designer. Some even go that far to call designers “a black sheep of the product teams”. So the challenge was clear – to make developers and designers friends or, even – to go a step further and to enable both these roles to perform the work they are best at without accepting too much, if any, compromise that would affect their work. This challenge was also more than just a challenge – it was source of frustration for both developers and designers.
Yeah – let me make something really clear right away – when I am saying “developers” I am thinking about all those traditionally technical roles like software architect, tester – and when I am saying “designers” I am thinking about all graphics, web, interaction, experience and other designers. So just to make things simpler and easier to understand – I will deal with developers and designers.
We should be aware of three very distinctive elements regarding developer and designer collaboration.
First is clear need for paradigm and workflow change. Classical workflow which was suggesting that developer is writing code in some development environment while designer is designing in tools such are Photoshop or Illustrator and after that they are trying to combine their work. Today, with XAML, we could have developer and designer working on the same project without messing each other’s work. So while developer is writing code, business logic – designer is able to design UI, interaction designers can test some interaction patterns…
Second idea is accepting the approach by which code and design (look and feel) of application are separated. So we have presentation layer at one side which is being wired with business logic / code via number of event handlers. Furthermore, design is located in one file, while business logice and code are located in so called code – behind files. Of course this idea is not something extremely new – HTML + CSS is somewhat on track with this, and ASP .net too. But anyhow, this idea is extremely important when it comes to full understanding of ongoing paradigm change.
And finally, third key idea involves tech support for complete idea of collaboration between designers and developers. From the perspective of developers – we have Visual Studio as great and fully-fledged development environment. But nowadays, for the first time platform has been opened towards designers with new Microsoft Expression Studio apps like Expression Blend or Expression Design. I won’t be going into details about Expression Studio at this place since I will be blogging (as I’ve done it before on UXPassion.com).
So at the end, we are witnessing something that we might call convergence between new workflow and new tools into unified development process which will, at the end, enable us to build better, greater user experience and more stable and simpler applications with enhanced efficiency.
In next article: What, exactly is XAML and how does it enable collaboration between designers and developers? Talking about 4 key elements of XAML and it’s influence on developer – designer collaboaration.