Fri, May 19, 2006
It's a dog on a dog house
I’ve been catching some really good posts over at Comments
I’ve been catching some really good posts over at Blue Flavor’s blog. The ever-knowledgeable and experienced Nick Finck (happy 10!) provocatively titles the latest “Recycable information architecture“.
And I totally agree. As brilliant as scribbles in your Moleskine might be, it ain’t work if it doesn’t leave your brain and enter someone else’s head. Designer’s communicate ideas. To developers, clients, users, whomever, so you need to be able to very quickly — and with little effort — transfer your conclusions to someone else.
Your ideas come out in higher or lower fidelity (with definite trade-offs at either end). Nick mentions XHTML wireframes.
Eh… I’m lukewarm on these as general practice for most designers. Changes can be quick and easy, but this assumes you know your way around CSS. And browsers. And platforms. (Nick agrees they aren’t for everyone or every situation.)
If you’re modelling in XHTML/CSS why not learn a decent javascript framework (e.g. Mochikit or Prototype) and add behavior? Why not pick up a decent server-side framework (e.g. CodeIgniter/Php, Rails/Ruby, Fusebox/Coldfusion) and add realistic back-end functionality. As everyone rightfully notes, changes can be quick and easy, but this assumes you know your way around javascript, Php/Ruby/Coldfusion. And databases. And web servers. And hosting environments.
This is getting real. Coding the entire application and being able to make quick changes. (The Agile… Rails book even mentions making changes to the back-end code with the client looking over your shoulder.) Getting real is about designing a version of the airplane and fixing it when it crashes.
Fixing it can be quick and easy, provided you know your way around an airplane engine. And structural engineering. And materials science.
Or you can just put a dog on a doghouse. This is what Cooper’s talking about.
I use HTML wireframes. They’re not XHTML because I iterate the hell out of them, and I could care less whether they validate. Its more important to have the interaction right. (And I’ve also been coding since before tables were introduced to constrain column-widths.)
But if I ever reach that zenith where I can communicate everything by telling stories — by putting dogs on dog houses — then you can bet I won’t ever touch a piece of code again until it’s time to go to production.
Jurgens Pieterse sums these thoughts up nicely over at Enterprise Design Strategy:
Sometimes we are looking for complicated solutions while a very simple solution can go a far way to bring alignment between business and IT. The lesson for me today was that simple is often better. Business is not impressed by IT’s gadget’s and complexity.
(Dan Brown’s book on better deliverables is out soon!)
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