Designers VS Programmers - I win, you lose!

So I was asked for ideas on how to best teach designers to work with programmers. I have no authority to teach anything, but here's what I can share.

Designers are proud people. They’re the ones who make the site look pretty, and, come on, design is unique and it sells. On the other hand, anyone can write a few lines of code.

Or so they think.

I studied Industrial Design for 3 years, and then moved on study Marketing and Technopreneurship. During this time, I took a module with Professor Ben Leong, taking on the role of a ‘designer’ while working with a programmer on a Facebook app, and am now working in two tech companies doing design and marketing.

But let’s get back to the main topic. Ah yes. Those proud designers who think anyone can spew lines of code. Which is partially true. However, like all specializations, there’s a vast difference between quality code and.. well, just lines of crap. And while it can all look pretty much the same from a user’s standpoint, the code can determine whether the user experience is great or frustrating. (Hint: Code can affect user interaction, data presentation and even page loading speeds)

On the other hand, design isn’t just about making the page look pretty. It’s also about user interaction, and how to improve user experience.

So since both programmers and designers are important, who gets to say “I’m right, do it my way”? Let me share three memorable lessons that I’ve learnt over this past year or so.

Lesson number 1: Why should I learn programming?!?! - Ajax vs HTML

While working on my Facebook app with a very talented programmer, we agreed that we wanted to prioritize user experience. That was good – our site needed good user interaction so that people could have a flawless purchase process. One of our lectures about was AJAX, and so we strove to apply that in our app, since we felt that it’d give a good user experience. After almost three weeks, the site still wasn’t up (the initial estimated deadline was a week).

Later, I found out that the site would have taken barely 2 days to complete if it had been done in HTML script, and still provided the same user experience at low traffic levels. What had gone wrong? I had no programming background, and failed to understand the difference in AJAX and HTML scripting. To me, it was all ‘just code’. We were so caught up in ‘providing great user experience’ that we failed to see other options and prioritize according to our deadlines.

Lesson 2: It’s not perfect, it’s iterative

Designers like to get everything right on the first try. I don’t paint half a picture, sell it, then add in the details 6 months later. That doesn’t make any sense to me. The web, however, runs at a completely different pace than your average ‘painting’, and time is seldom a luxury. That’s why you have a buggy Vista launch, and half a dozen updates every month. Designers have to understand that, and learn how to come up with ‘imperfect’ first revisions of their work.

On the other hand, some things need to be perfect from the start. I know of a company that settled for something ‘quick and dirty’ due to time constraints, and never got back to upgrading that particular feature. It was far too much work – nobody wanted to take time off to attend to this annoying buggy bit of the program. It’s been almost 10 years now, and the amount of frustration caused and man-hours lost in inefficiency has long exceeded the additional week of development time. Some things just have to be done right. The difficulty lies in finding what.

Lesson Three: My development time is more precious than your designing time

“Please design and update the About Us page.”
“Excuse me? You want me to do HTML?”
“Yes – we have no development time to spare.”

And so, I took on the insurmountable challenge of coding a page in HTML. Before I carry on, let me explain – I’m a walking code destroyer. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, I can’t seem to even copy and paste code without messing something up. Everyone knew that. But now that my head was on the line, I braced myself and took up the task.

It took one week. One whole week to get a single page up. And in the process, I continually disturbed three excellent programmers by asking them “why my text had gone completely awry”. Any of these three programmers could have done the job in 30 minutes. I think I disturbed them for more than 2 hours.

Was it worth it? For me, yes. I learnt something new. I can now safely say that <p> is for a new paragraph, <embed> allows you to embed a Flash object into a page, and <textarea> allows you to display code as text. (Don’t laugh – that’s how horrendous my programming knowledge is.) But for my company, they lost more hours of development time AND a week’s worth of design time for this little lesson. If the point is to let your team learn cross-disciplinary skills, this venture is well worth the time. But if it’s to ‘save development time’, forget it. You’re going to lose out.

So here's what I have to bring to the table based on my limited experience - hope it helps!