Form Does Not Follow Function, They Dance Together
Tags: Design, Donald Norman, Productivity, Silverlight, Skinning, Styles, WPF
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 2:04 am and is filed under Agile, General, Productivity, Values, by Scott.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
There is no real dilemma; there is only cold hard truth - adapt or perish. It is clear that the market will continue to move towards applications that entice more productivity from their users because of attractive and great usability experience, and of course those software development teams that become capable of building them efficiently and effectively for less cost will gain more market share and hence become more profitable and grow. The synergy is undeniable; and the writing is on the wall.
As to the dillema of how to make the jump, another cold hard truth is that developers typically do not have the skill sets to do the graphical design, although they often can improve their knowledge and skills surrounding usability concepts…IF they want to expend the effort. It is clear that development teams now absolutely must integrate design talent into the development process; that is the action item.
Microsoft has forseen this and is supporting it technically with their Expression Suite of tools. Just today we introduced our design partner Joy Busse of Busse Design to Expression tools, and expect to be working closely to intergate her company’s fantastic graphical design and usability capability into our Agile teams for our custom development and our Agile Enterprise JumpStart customers.
Don, I think I may have not been as clear as possible on the nature of the dilemma. This is “leading technology,” not current market technology and as such we are going to have to go out and sell this as a “better way.” The dilemma is that developer’s skill at doing skinning tend to be limited yet in the new paradigm of WPF and Silverlight Markus Egger points out that productivity is gained by doing automation via skinning. I agree with both Markus and Stephen and add to the mix the need to market these developing skills to clients. My suspicion is that this will seem like another new “snake oil” we are pitching if we’re not careful. I think it would be helpful if we create some test projects and try and get a handle on the productivity gains. That can be marketed. - Scott
I agree but think this is ‘leading technology’ only in the market that we have mostly been engaged with, namely Enterprise clients needing and building Line of Business applications with Microsoft technology. These concepts fairly new to us and our collegues in this domian are not new at all in those markets where Flash, Flex and high end web based graphical presentation have been evolving for years. I also agree with Markus Egger that the potential productivity gains are huge once we learn to adapt and integrate the new tech into our daily processes by building or using new tools that help to automate the process, especially for developers typically challenged by the intricacies of graphical design and integration.
See my BLOG entry here on Why should developers learn Blend?