Interview by Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins

• Jump to: Jordan Nielsen Weinman Mullenweg Finck Purgason Sodaplay WWFT

Eric Jordan:
At 2advanced we pride ourselves on being able to marry visual design with the backend. We consider it to be our main strength. How do we do it? It is very simple; everyone communicates, everyone shares, and everyone learns from one another. We don’t simply design something up and then hand it off to the development team and say “Here, make this work. Thanks!”

You have to have a lot of back and forth and sharing of knowledge between design and development in order to make this work. It is as rudimentary as sitting down with the programmer and saying “Hey I would like to retain the integrity of this design element, how can we program this so that it isn’t messed up in the end?” Or Vice versa, a programmer will sit down with a designer and say “I really want this functionality to shine through, is there a way you can adjust your design to fit the functionality I am trying to achieve.” It all comes down to communication. If the development team cannot talk to the design team and vice versa, then there is a fundamental communication issue that exists that must be solved before any kind of progress can be made in this area.

Jakob Nielsen:
My recommendation is to let the users drive the project. Not by having them design the site, because users are not designers, but by making the design decisions based on what users need, as revealed through user research. Instead of arguing over what to do, and making the decision based on who's the best debater or the best at company politics, make your decisions based on what works best for your customers. Quickly mock-up your ideas as paper prototypes and test them with real users. This can be done in a day or two, and is usually faster than continuing the debate inside your own company.

Unfortunately, most design teams don't believe that you can get user data from a rough design draft that you can mock up in a day. Instead, they waste months on programming something that turns out to be the wrong idea. And by the time you find out, it's too late to make fundamental changes. That's why I made a video on paper prototyping to convince more teams to try this cheap and effective usability method. Next time you find yourself bogged down in an argument between different members of your team, try making a paper prototype and have your users provide the answer.
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Lynda Weinman:
For the majority of sites designers and developers have to work together – even though they don’t always speak the same language. Tools are really changing right now – many design tools are adding hooks and handles that programmers can grab onto without changing the design. Two that come to mind are the future Fireworks that will be released with CS3 (previewed at the Adobe MAX conference recently) and Expression Graphic Designer that writes WPF and XAML as the underlying graphics and markup language. Flash is another tool that has a visual design environment that developers can grab onto and make functional without changing the design, and Flash 9 will be able to convert hand-animated designs into kosher Actionscript code with a few clicks. The communication gap is going to lessen in the very near future.

Matt Mullenweg:
I think more developers should study visual design. Robin Williams has a few good books on basic design principles and typography. You can get 80% to a great interface with no visual design skills at all, if you think about the user every step of the way and follow a handful of rules. Let designers focus on the last 20% where they can really shine.

Nick Finck:
I wrote about Form vs. Function in 2001, it is a very old and outdated article as far as examples go, but interestingly enough it's still very relevant even today. I think the take away here is it's not one versus the other, it's form ever follows function, meaning the two are inseparable and function should always be the first priority.
A good example here would be when you go into a furniture store and see a piece of furniture like a chair that is so beautiful it blows your mind.. I mean really a work of art here. When you go to sit down in it, you realize that's just it.. it's a piece of art, it's totally uncomfortable and cold feeling due to the choices the designer made. Maybe they wanted it to be that way, I don't know.. but to me it's just a beautiful chair that I would never sit in if I owned it.
How many designers who build beautiful sites without any consideration for the user actually go back to their work on a regular basis and use it.. I mean really use it like try to find information on that site or fill out a form.. what a pain. I prefer to invest my time in things that cause me little pain.

Todd Purgason:
Everything has a time and a place if you over focus on form and ignore function you have big problems and vice versa. The key is to respect each other and work to evolve both in unison to keep up with the needs and desire of culture. With that said the web is a medium of function as such function is a bigger reward to users than form, but at the same time form typically allows for more impact, memorability and influence. So the point is we need both so the people that harness both will out do those that are myopically focused on one or the other.

Sodaplay:
“Function vs. Form” or a conflict between “Visual Design vs. Backend Programming” does not apply to Soda’s way of working. We’re all pulling together to make a project work. To answer your question, maybe the thing that can be done is to be less concerned with labels.

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WeWorkForThem:
People can work together if they listen and hear. Sometimes we need to pick battles and concentrate on things that just do not matter. Some things do. I do not know the struggles that designers fight with programmers. It has always been easy for me to work with programmers, they tell me what can and can not be done and I listen to them. They often solve my problems for me or suggest something better, so I like programmers. I just wish we could find a reliable one. ;)