Enter the interaction architect
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Developer, Adobe, Internet on
Adobe’s MAX event here in Milan has seen the European unveiling of its upcoming Catalyst web application design tool. It’s here that it’s also begun to discuss how it sees web application development workflows changing to improve the often fractious relationship between designer and developer.
The launch of Flex (developed by ASP co-architect Mark Anders) changed the way the development world looked at Flash. A tool for producing animations and the butt of a million “Skip Intro” jokes had become a new way of producing complex state-based user interfaces. Flex made Flash as much a part of Web 2.0 as AJAX. Even so, there were still problems. It was easy to tell a Flex site, as the limited skinning capabilities made Flex controls look the same wherever you went on the web. You could design your own controls from scratch, but then they became as much part of the code as a site’s business logic - which was exactly the thing it was trying to prevent.
Designers and developers don’t think the same way. That’s not a bad thing - the creative tension between the two ways of working can deliver amazing applications with intuitive ways of working. However, it also means that they don’t work well while sitting in each other’s pockets, working on each little piece of a page. What’s best is that architectural utopia, the complete seperation of design and code. Developers can work on business logic without affecting the design, and designers can do the opposite…
That’s the idea behind Catalyst (perhaps still best known by its codename “Thermo”). Designers can start work in familiar Illustrator and Photoshop, and then import their layers into Catalyst. Here they can map out buttons and dynamic content, marking them up and adding state information to a design. The resulting prototype can be converted into a new FXG format, and imported straight into Flex. Developers can start work on the code straightaway, adding the logic behind the buttons and the dynamic content. Meanwhile the designer team can concentrate on fine tuning the interactions, producing a user interface that’s clean and easy to use. The two versions can eventually be merged, ready for testing and delivery. It’s a simple, clear workflow that brings designers and developers closer together, concentrating on their strengths and avoiding the pitfalls of their weaknesses.
Of course this means we’ll need a new kind of designer, one who’s focussed on the user experience and on how it should be delivered. We’ve already got application architects putting together the backend, and information architects managing metadata (as well as database architects handling storage). So why not call this role the interaction architect? It’s definitely a senior role that defines the direction of the UI component of an application -
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