What exactly is Visual Design?

Sholom Sandalow, Saturday, March 3, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in Six plus years as an Interface Designer is that Visual Design can mean many different things.  There’s ample opportunity for misunderstanding between client and designer at this phase of a project.  Which is why it’s so important to clearly define what’s involved and what will be delivered prior to starting work on the Visual Design phase.

No Two interface design projects are the same.  Each has its own unique characteristics, assumptions, expectations and final deliverables.  I’ve worked on projects where Visual Design meant custom building every widget, every window and every button in the application.  Months were spent hand crafting scroll bars, window resize handles, navigation tabs, and window frames.   I’ve also worked on projects where Visual Design was only a matter of positioning and aligning form fields. Although on paper a Visual Design process should be standardized, it also needs to be flexible enough to handle a diversity of projects without shoehorning them all into the same rigid methodology. 

A critical step in this process is defining what the client expects when they talk about Visual Design.  It’s important to interview the key client stakeholders to get an accurate description of their expectations.  Be as detailed as you can in your interviews.  Try to leave no stone unturned.  The more you know about what they expect you to deliver, and in what form they need it, the greater the odds of a successful product being delivered.  Sometimes the client can’t clearly define what they need.  Sometimes they aren’t really even sure what they need.  And sometimes they might even misunderstand the nature and implications of their request.  In these cases it’s important that you use your role as domain expert to help them get a better understanding of the complexities and issues involved in the Visual Design phase.  Client education is sometimes an integral part of defining the scope of the project.

After this step, which I call diagnosis, you should be more informed about the scope and specifics of the project.  You should know what platform the interface will be rendered on, and what development environment it will be developed in.  You should know to what extent you need to customize, and how much can and will be programmatically generated.  You’ll understand what level of graphic sophistication the Product Manager expects, and what types of production files the developer needs. 

Having clearly defined all of these variables, you can get to work designing with the focus you need to deliver a successful product.

user experience design

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment