The Pixel Code » Design

Working with UX Design

Mohammed Khan — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:36:46 +0000

Been working on a product development had made me realize that its always tough to get best of the combined tribes, Developers & Designers. The whole success factor depends on how well they have been integrated in the process, and how user experience and development is perceived. The occurrences where product developers and user experience designers collaborate poorly can easily be improvised. Which would mean incorporating a more dynamic & integrated product development process where both teams work together on key phases and in shorter and more frequent cycles rather than long, inflexible phases. What I have outlined below are some observations and tried out mechanisms which have been taken to accomplish a more integrated process.

Treat the specifications and user experience design documents as breathing documents.
Regularly the development and user experience design teams should exchange feedbacks, and incorporate collective notes.
User experience designers should stick to constraints defined by product developers, should consider the viability of their design in the context of implementation and marketability, and should consult with product developers on viability of features.
Product developers should not seek to define how each feature should work, but should rather define the broader project goals and product requirements.
Both user experience designers and product developers should be involved in identifying opportunities, competitive analysis, market and user research, feature design, design refinement, implementation.
Both teams should utilize an iterative and dynamic product design process instead of rigid, linear approach.

Moreover, I believe that the optimal product design and development process necessitates both product development and user experience design methodologies. I call this approach “product experience development” to emphasize the equal rolls of both fields in the overarching process. Product design and development focused on only one of the fields is incomplete and ineffectual.

Need for Design Documentation

Mohammed Khan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:22:50 +0000

In the early days of my profession, I always hated the word “Documentation”. For me it was a process (more of a routine), which was time consuming, boring and hardly any tools to automate, as from one project to another the format was different. And today at this point in my career, I regard it as the most important process to make a project delivery successful. And when its all about Design of the application, its usually make or break for project delivery. Documents are also meant to capture idea, and in the process it tends to reform the idea for better.

A lot has changed since Rich Internet Application platforms came into existence (post 2003), design documentation has become more complex and evolved into a more mature form of art. Yes, I said “Art”, because in its current form, UI Designers, Experience Designers or Information Architects, use their own creativity to prepare a set of design documents. Hardly there is any standard format which is widely used by all UI Designers. And this makes obvious, on how can an effective design documentation be prepared. Well there are set of definitions for a Design Documentation, otherwise knows as Deliverables, and each design firm has their own process to create and communicate these deliverables. After all at the end these deliverables are meant to communicate one’s vision to other team members.

Effectively communicating the idea of how the application design looks and feels, makes the documentation a valuable asset in the delivery mechanism. Also at times, it makes new team members integrate well with the team, as it helps them understand the application better, and make decisions in coming time more soundly. Design documentation is meant to be designed by and for the people who are :

1. Planners (make deliverables)
2. Converters (use deliverables)
3. Decision Makers (approve deliverables)

So if you are heading on a new assignment or managing one already, just run up a sanity check on your design documentation, it always pays off.

Delivering RIA using 5D Process

Mohammed Khan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:40:51 +0000

At Esberi (the place where I work), a 5D process is used to develop RIA, but on a personal note, I believe processes are for large organizations where the team size is large and it would be necessary then to have processes, workflows or information exchange protocols. For smaller teams, the motive behind organization should be to harness creativity and productivity. But does this mean I disown the process (in fact I drafted the illustrations for it) which Esberi has, well not. When working with clients who are more like Outsourcing managers, Project managers, or any manager oriented contact, processes like 5D helps to deliver in systematic approach which managers usually would like to. This gives the client side managers the ability to track progress at each level, but at times in my own personal experience, the client side managers bring along their own workflows and deliverable’s standards.

But when working with clients, where the contact is more of developer or designer profile, its always to better speak in their language and adapt around their working environment, small things like SVN vs CVS, Illustrator vs Photoshop, matter alot. Its always fun to work with these kinds of profile as you learns and share alot with like minded people. And usually this kind of client profile are small design firms or startups or individual consultants. This sort of work also helps to be Agile, try SCRUM and Waterfall, sometime at end we wind up mixing all, we realize this only during the bar hangout session (my favorite is Orangina) after the project closure meets.

Anyways, I was invited at the RIAaction 2009 event in Singapore to speak on how 5D process helps to deliver RIA, apart from getting a chance to speak at this event, I got also a chance to evaluate the Big 3 RIA technologies, as the event was sponsored by Microsoft, Google and Adobe, it was a unique opportunity to look at all three RIA platforms under one roof, Flash, Silverligth and GWT.

Delivering RIA Using 5D Process

View more presentations from Mohammed Khan.

Sorry attaching the audio commentary makes the file too large, also usually I sound more like a beaten up Homer.

A Pixel born out of a Code

Mohammed Khan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:46:20 +0000

Been working for last three years with RIA platforms, it was hard to share stuff at personal level with the community, though I was posting at my company’s blog engine, satisfaction never came. The thought of creating a personal blog site has been around for last one year on my mind, but work always kept me away from thinking and organizing ideas for the blog. Finally this month (my workload was a bit at ease, thanks to slowdown), I made up to have one in place.

The first thing to work was on the content theme, what will I share with the community and how will I organize it ? It was not easy for me to figure out because by profession I work in capacity of Project Director for RIA domain, but by virtues I design apps and hardware interfaces, and sail out the development. So the managerial and developer instincts contradicted within me.

Finally after some help from friends at work in form of a brainstorm session over the coffee table helped me shape the blog. Right from domain name to tag line, to content, I had to evolve my thoughts around the end users. Because whatever you do on web has to be shaped according the user’s perspective, even if it gonna be your own personal blog. User centric thinking has always helped me to architect and deliver the right solution to clients, and I believe its gonna be the same story here. If I can’t deliver content according the user’s need then I don’t think this blog should exist. What disturbs now as I write is, “Isn’t blog suppose to be medium of personal expression ?”, and the justification my mind throws to me is “Dude you are not working on a social blog, its gonna be technical, only place where you can express is in the Design category”. This is fine with me, in coming time I would bring out my thoughts on design and development here and I wouldn’t be satisfied till there isn’t any feedback, which I believe will help me refine my content. So kindly comment and lets have meaningful discussions !!!