Visual Design as a Balancing Act

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, June 22, 2007 @ 12:17 am

Visual Design for software can sometimes be a balancing act.  Successful visual design  requires both a close relationship with developers, and the foresight to know when to pull back and be a proper user’s advocate.

The Visual Designer should maintain a close relationship with development for a few reasons.  First, the role of the visual designer is to ultimately deliver production ready screen comps to the developer.  It is essential to have intimate knowledge of the technologies behind the implementation, so that those comps can be reproduced in code.  In addition, realistically, the Visual Design, and Implementation phases will overlap significantly, and the designers and developers have to work together to solve UI challenges that weren’t uncovered in previous phases of the project.  In such instances, inevitably design decisions will have to be made on the fly, and the informed and aware designer will be better prepared to make good design decisions  in that environment.

Yet, it is also important that the relationship not be deleterious to the ultimate goal—building a product that works for the user.  By definition, development’s concern must be with technology—defining and configuring the tools that access, process, and render data.  Designers must be aware of the technology, but focus primarily on the user experience.  More succinctly, development must focus on how, while design must focus on what.  Getting to involved on the development side of the equation, the tendency will be to start focusing on the how more than the what. That’s when designers must pull back, and realize where their role should be.      

user experience design

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