Been a long time between posts. I suppose that’s what happens when you have 2 kids birthdays, renovation plans and project crunch time! But, I’m back – for now!
I attended a session run by Shane Morris at Microsoft on Wednesday titled “The Age of User Experience“.
The first half of the presentation was a good session by Shane and Stamford Interactive. Concise, to the point and engaging. Very well done.
The second half was a shameless plug of the Expression Suite and a demonstration of Expression Web and Blend. From what I gathered, Microsoft are trying to convince the interface/interaction designers that they can use products like Expression Web and Blend as a replacement from traditional documentation. I like the thinking but can’t get past the fact that designers generally don’t know or care about XML, (X)HTML, CSS, Data Binding or scripting. Further, although Expression Web apparently produces standards based code, the demonstration I saw showed me that without knowledge of CSS we will end up replacing tag soup with class soup. Every style was applied as a class, there was no mention of semantics or document structure.
I won’t go into details as I don’t want to flame anyone but the Expression Web demonstration was terrible. Shane did pull it together for the Blend demo and while I liked and understood it all , I think I was in the minority as most of the attendees didn’t have the development background that I have.
Although I won a copy of Expression Web for asking the best question (along the lines of my points above), I think the best point was made by another attendee who worried that giving designers the power to become ‘micro coders’ is very dangerous. If you know a little bit about a subject, you are likely to do a bad job. Designers hat the fact that everyone thinks they are a design expert. Imagine the effect of making everyone an HTML/CSS expert. I can picture the IT team taking over the files created by the designers and throwing their arms up at the state of the code produced by the WYSIWYG Expression Web interface.
Communication between designers and developers is the key to success here, not trying to make designers developers and vice versa. I’d love to see Microsoft tackling the documentation issue and building innovative tools that supported stronger inter-team communication, rather than trying to play catch up with Adobe. How about some sort of tool that would allow us to provide better design documentation. Could it plug into VSTS? Have tabs for screenshot, interactions, exceptions/errors, etc etc… The key is supporting people’s current methods and providing tools to enhance the experience, rather than trying to make people do things they are not trained to do.
Shane drilled the point “Same data, differentiated experience”. I’d like to see “Same methods, differentiated development experience” come out of Microsoft.
