Focusing on Design

Lately I have been thinking more and more about design. Not "big up front design" and the piles of specs and UML, but user interface and application design. When you think about the applications that you use the most, they are usually the applications that solve an important problem or provide an essential service, and they make it easy, simple, and enjoyable to do it.

To people who would argue that back-end performance, uptime, scalability, unit tests, etc. are more important than design I would simply point to Twitter. Twitter has had many problems, but they continue to thrive because they provide an excellent service in such a nice and simple, usable, way. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter needs to fix their problems, but you could fill up 140 characters pretty quickly with the names of all the sites that had tons of scalability, uptime, unit tests, and failed because they were hard to use.

As a developer and a consultant I usually get zero input into the design of an application from a usability and design perspective. Over the last 8 years I have built a windows forms application that acts that feels like a FoxPro application, a web application that feels like a mix between a Windows application and an AS/400 application, and now I am working on a web application that feels and acts like an Access application. I guess it partly comes with the territory of working on enterprise applications that are replacing legacy systems, but I can only imagine the benefit to the application and the company if we had taken the time to re-think the problems we were solving and come up with a simpler and easier to use design.

I don’t want to make these mistakes on my own applications and sites, so one of my main goals this year is to learn the most I can about design.

The other night I went to a local group called Refresh The Triangle and watched a presentation by Rob Goodlatte that really opened my eyes and helped me realize how much I don’t know about design in general. Rob talked about designing a web site and how it is more than just aesthetics and you have to carefully look at the purpose and function first before just "making it look nice". In my mind I have always somewhat separated application functionality and UI design from the aesthetics and I can now see that they are all one and the same. You shouldn’t do all your UI and application functional design and then just slap some pretty colors and design on there. And vice-versa you shouldn’t mock up some pretty aesthetics and then mash your UI into it.

This thought leads me down a path I didn’t think I would be going, which is namely to become more of a graphic designer as well. In the past I have usually paid someone else to do design of my sites, but now I can see some of the problems that has caused. The rest of Rob’s presentation includes lots of insight in how to use things like grids, baseline grids, typography, etc. These are all things I am going to spending more time learning and blogging about in the future.

-James