

Dancing Without A Partner - mh_
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3364-dancing-without-a-partner

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billyjobob
I always thought a web designer was someone who knew HTML, a Mac UI designer
was someone who knew ObjC and XCode, etc. But apparently it's now normal for a
professional 'designer' to be an artist who just knows Photoshop, who then
hands over to a programmer who recreates the whole design from scratch in
code!

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ovi256
Well, in French web agencies, there's a third person in the middle, called an
"HTML integrator" who gets the photoshop sketches and makes them into HTML,
CSS and static images, who then hands this to the programmers who plugs the
dynamic bits in there. I think this is responsible in a large part for the
design tropes of the French web.

Newer/hip startups don't do this, they use designers who write HTML/CSS, like
the rest of the world.

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fidanov
When I read this I remembered when few years ago DHH(also from 37signals) was
talking that there is no place for the "The Idea Guy" in today's companies.

Similarly, that is what I think about software/web designers not been able to
implement their own designs, due to the lack of knowledge about programming.
You don't need to be an expert to implement them. All you need is a basic
knowledge of the platform for which you are building the design.

I realize that acquiring this knowledge may be difficult, and it may take some
time. The same goes for programmers who don't know how to design the interface
of their products. They don't need to become experts but they can teach
themselves the basics. I was in such situation with time and experiments my
designs improved, but I am not an expert.

To sum up, "Dancing Without A Partner", you don't need a partner for this
dance, you just need to learn a little hip hope and turn on the music,
everything else its just an excuse for laziness.

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psweber
UX design tools and processes are definitely lagging behind right now. The
annotated wireframe document created in Visio, InDesign, OmniGraffle, etc. is
still the norm. The closest thing we have to a solid prototyping tool is Axure
(<http://www.axure.com/>), but creating anything beyond the equivalent of
clickable JPGs is kludgy to say the least.

Kids fresh out of HCI and interaction design school are close to useless,
because they have no experience having their designs developed. Seeing them
interact with (frustrated) seasoned developers can be very painful. UX
designers should learn enough about programming to be dangerous for many
reasons, but hand coding prototypes probably isn't ever going to be a scalable
answer. I fantasize about working on a next gen UX prototyping tool all the
time, but, to use the article's metaphor, I don't have a dance partner for
that.

~~~
timjaeger
Look more people need to be coding and understand as much as possible about
frameworks, databases, javascript, RoR, NodeJS, responsive design, dev time
frames, Agile, etc.

I am a UX Designer who can code (Rails, Javascript, CSS etc.) and it
embarasses me when I talk to others that are just 'wireframe monkeys'. If you
don't know HTML how can anyone trust your designs?

I can only take so much - UX people need to step up and LEARN this stuff. If
you don't you will just pave your own path to irrelevancy.

If it were up to me there would be some other way to describe UX ppl that know
tech and those that can merely hit something with the pretty stick and leave
devs scratching their heads...

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psweber
I mostly agree with you. Many UX professionals I have worked with are almost
proud about the fact that they don't have hands on experience with software
development or visual design. They are the worst of both worlds. That being
said, I don't think that a UX designer should spend the average day working on
the nuts and bolts of development. A structural architect builds models and
then collaborates with someone with more expertise who is in charge of the
real building process. The comparison isn't perfect, but I think that as our
industry matures, it will more closely resemble that. UX architects need a
better modeling tool.

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thelarry
Do you mean use something like a BaaS?

