The Meat and Potatoes
Perception of Designers and Developers
March 9th, 2008
While debating with Omar, our Lead Developer at Scrapblog, about a small chunk of UI, I noticed something interesting about the dynamic between a designer and developer. A designer trusts his eyes regardless of the logic behind the scenes, while a developer trusts the logic regardless of what he sees. In this situation I was making the case that the interface element in question was not properly aligned, and from my point of view, this was abundantly clear. I didn’t care about the code. Conversely, Omar insisted that the code was correct and didn’t care what it looked like. It will be interesting to see how my perception changes as I move further into the coding world with my current side project.
I doubt you’ll see your perception of visual cues change. The visual eye is very different from the logical mind. While coding, you may create something that should logically be nicely aligned, but when you see it on the screen, your artist’s eye will reject your logical mind’s assessment. This happens to me very often whenever I’m skinning or creating anything from a mock to a screen or html pages. Even though I’m a very rational and logical person in most things, whenever my artist’s eye knows something is wrong, I just tend to go with what it says, even if I have to change the logic to make it look right.
I would have to agree with the developer on this one. If you can assert through unit tests that the code is accurate, a designer can scream until he is blue in the face. The view should receive raw, unformatted data, and the UI designer can sculpt his masterpiece. If the visual/view is uglified, than the designer is at fault. I hate hacks … but if I wanted to showcase a piece to a potential client, i wouldn’t try to justify design flaws on a developer who didn’t know his ‘A’ from a hole in the ground.
I run into this a lot with Flex. It’s inherently messy to skin and many times the output does not match up with what the code is telling it to do for whatever reason. So something may say it has 10px of padding, when it clearly is showing 20px.
I know almost zero about flex, but I would have to say, it sounds like the logic and presentation are tightly coupled.
The problem is Flex. If you tell Flex to display something, and for some reason it doesn’t, it can be so painful to figure out why (and fix it) that a developer is prone to madness. “Maybe Flex is right. Maybe there’s a bug in my eyes.”