One reason it’s so hard to integrate Designers with an agile development team is the tools.
Graphics Designers or Producers create Photoshop (PSD) files that does not show how the user can interact or how it should respond to various screen sizes and platforms. PSD is great for creating individual elements, such as icons, buttons and (obviously) photos, but not for defining the look and feel of the entire site. And if some details need to change, it’s a heavy process to update in PSD and export again.
Interaction Designers use some kind of wireframe tool (e.g. Keynote) to ”define all interactions”, perhaps with a clickable prototype. It’s not uncommon that these ”specs” go beyond 300 pages. Once development starts, things tend to change and after 2-3 days, the 300 pages of interaction design are no longer up to date. Already at the first sprint demo, is the original design out of date. It takes a lot of time for the designer to keep all details up to date, as decisions are made quickly within the agile dev team.
To fully integrate Design and Development, we need a new tool, that can, for most tasks, replace Photoshop and Illustrator. The new tool should be:
- Lightweight as Keynote
- Produce High Fidelity graphics like Photoshop
- Export well-formed HTML/CSS that works in modern browsers
All three must be fulfilled. There is no tool like that today.
Adobe, please!
The post Adobe, please give us a proper Lean UX Tool! appeared first on Peter Stark.
