[IxDA Discuss] Am I a Unicorn?

[Fred Beecher]

On 11/6/06, Daniel Weese <dweese at caelumtechnology.com> wrote:
>
> For future interviews, how do you balance and sell the need for design with the need for the executives to feel like they're getting their money's worth from the developers?

Propose a phased approach. What can the developers get started on
before working on the interface? Has the requirements process begun?
Is there a database that can be built & populated before interface
development begins? For any sort of Web application, there are usually
plenty of things developers can get started on before they need to
start worrying about how people are going to work with the app  (For
your average brochure-ware site, though, this is less true. The design
pretty much has to come before the coding, because there's nothing [or
very little] to code outside of the HTML.)

While the developers are banging away on the database or Java Beans or
whatever else, you can be out there finding out about user needs and
then making some design decisions about those needs. By the time
you've got a UI design pulled together, development should be ready to
start coding it.

(Caveat: This is not always the case... a good, solid requirements
gathering process helps make this phased design & development process
work smoothly.)

I hope that helps you out, Dan.

Take care,
Fred