The Adventures of Cindy Li

Web2.0:The New Hybrid Designer

April 16 , 2007

Once upon a time

Designers and Developers were separated… what happens when they are one?  Chris Messina, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith and Richard MacManus discuss what the new world brings. Companies want the person that can do everything HTML, Flash, DHTML, Apollo, and whatever latest technologies are. 

Right brain vs Left Brain

Jeremy Keith:Learn the terminology from both sides.Learn it as a developer to speak designer. Designers learn developer speak.
It’s communication that will save us.

What you can do to achieve hybrid?

Chris Messina: Usually a mockup will silence everything, create mockups, posted them on flickr, that look them like boards but a predetermined flow to get developers thinking.Getting them to see what you are thinking.

Give up control, let the pixels go, let the browsers go and accept that level of control and do the right thing you’ll do better.

Talking about yourself as a hybrid

Acko.net, ability to write code that goes into the core of drupol. Stephen is also a designer. It makes him especially effective. interfacultair Theatrefestival. He’s a lot more effective.

Jeremy: Go see the view source. Go check it. Open sources are great because you can learn anything. Closed technologies dont’ wrok.

Mashups making them available to other companies.

Messina:Tax day to figure out expenses to use Plazes to figure out where I’ve been. Wouldn’t it be useful to grab that data and map it over the last year. And see how I can go over my bank statements to figure out where/what I’ve done.I went into documentation using code. I want to download my plazes data and convert it to view it on google earth. So it’ll help me get my taxes done. After the 8 hours I got a ruby script to load my plazes on google earth. It didn’t help my taxes done. I sent it to plazes (felix) and export the data. If you are fluent in idea about pulling various services you can fly helicopters and solve problems.

How do I get people to digest my API? How do you view the data and how do you design around data.

Kelly Goto:What is the most efficient way to get to the data?
Messina:Documenting screenshots to see what good interfaces are out there.Learning more about what desktop interfaces are. Mobile?
Keith:Don’t open photoshop to see how things fit. Site maps when it works w/pages we don’t work that way anymore. Post it notes are the way to go.
Do tasks. User testing.