Not long ago I was handed a project that had been designed by other teams (marketing teams). When the project was handed off to me the selection of development tools had been made based on the experience of the people making the decisions. Unfortunately the client knew little of the tool, and those who recommended the tool knew nothing about the client’s wishes for the site - they just knew the tool in question.

After months of meetings and mock-ups there had not been a single working prototype nor a meeting that included anyone who would be using, developing, or maintaining the website. The end result was a month of trying to work with a tool that easily allow for the type of website the client  wanted followed by a late switch to a tool the client was more familiar with that did fit those needs. Interestingly I got the project because the client was less than thrilled with the mock-ups he was receiving from the people who knew and recommended the discarded tool. The sites in the mock-ups would have fit well within the environment of that tool.

The projects served to remind me that development is part of the design process. If you want to design and then develop you should probably expect that the time spent on design will be largely duplicated after development starts.

Little did I know that this was an IBM philosophy:

machines should work; people should think.

Thanks to Etre for pointing that out and showing the T-Shirt version. This is exactly how we feel at DMID. The goal of our technology is to allow people to do more of the thinking (and 2+2=4 is working not thinking) and let the machines do the things that just need to happen without thought.

Combined with prototyping, User-Centered Design is at the core of how we work. The more we keep the people at the center of any design problem the better the solution will be. The more we involve the actual users in the design process (as opposed to focus groups or theoretical users) the more effective the designs will be. In fact, I have noticed that the projects where the users are directly involved with the design process are also the ones that are the easiest to maintain and extend afterwards.

I was reminded of the importance of database normalization today as I worked on a database for a third-party learning management system that was not normalized. Due to a glitch somewhere a student was assigned to all the parts of 12 courses in the database without being assigned to any of the 12 courses. The result was that the student expected to take the courses, but was not given access to any of them.

A normalized database would list assignment to the parts of a course as an extension to being assigned to the course, you would not be able to be assigned to the course without being assigned to it’s elements, nor could you be assigned to an element of a course without having access to the course.

One of the most useful design practices I have found is prototyping. It helps to have a solid model that everyone can relate to as the design and development progress. I recently learned of a company that use prototyping in an area where I would not have considered it possible - marketing. Apparently they test marketing approaches to tune the marketing strategies of their clients. I guess that just goes to show how valuable and broadly applicable the practice of prototyping is.

One of the reasons that many designers find it easy to stick with solutions and environments similar to what they have already done is that a change of environment can alter the success of a design. That recognition has given us art that is context specific (where the artist not only creates the painting, but specifies the lighting under which it will be displayed).

It is not possible to translate things directly or perfectly from one media to another. I have often heard people say that a movie based on a book is never as good as the book. I have also noticed that books based on movies are not as good as the movie was. The reason is that what was successful in print does not necessarily translate to the screen and vice versa.

The difference of media would explain why so few artists can succeed as generalists. They almost always specialize in a specific media. They can’t duplicate the style that works in one medium into a successful style in a different medium.

I just had a thought about design - a designer understands that one size does not fit all - a marketer works on the assumption that one size can be made to fit all - or at least a sizable population.

Marketing of products and services is influential because money is best made through volume. This is detrimental to the design process of making sure that those products and services are working for people because it is often easier and quicker in the short-term to teach people to work with the limitations and biases of the technology being sold.