Balancing Creativity with User Testing -- Designer vs. Developer #2

Key Takeaways

[Music] designers feel that the creative process has become quite sterile uh like ux has sort of taking away the kind of the creativeness of it so before um a designer would go to art college um and everything about that was uh the creative process was coming internally but now everything seems to be validated and everything seems to be like very sterile and the way we create things is all about replicating the same user experience patterns and UI elements um and it feels like the validation part has taken away what it means to be creative like from developer perspective I must say data is very helpful um so I personally like it I like to you know have hard proof that what I'm working on or the decisions I'm making are having the the right impact on the user experience on the app I'm building or on the look and field but I can totally see where coming from uh when it comes to the creative process for example it's quite important and easy to measure stuff that is already out there to figure out if this decision was right or wrong but it's very hard to start with data you know to start the process of creating something new uh from hard facts you need this inity that you put into the app in the first place for example when I create some uh reference app um I want to showcase some techn technology or some new way of solving technological problem um but it's a front end up so I need to make it look and feel nice at the same time and I stand in this blank canvas and then I pray to have some creative designer next to me you know coming in with his inity rather than uh just you know getting my data and following the data flow I mean it does feel a bit like a chicken and egg situation what comes first the creative step of just Discovery I actually like to think about it as a sandwich you know rather than chicken and egg it's like you you have some bread and then some feeling and then some bread again so I think it all starts with kind of creative process um by designer or by some you know creative person that is working on a given product um to have a the starting idea and then you get data and user testing and all this you know heavy Weaponry for um polishing the original idea so that it's the best um you can get but then at the top top you still need this touch of inity you know like when I think about different um visual Frameworks on the web they kind of stop at this second layer they took the initial idea they applied a lot of data to make it as nice and you know to use and as usable and as browser friendly environment friendly whatever um you need and they stop there but then the design need to take such a visual framework and touch this something unique you know that to make a given app or product outstanding and and sometimes I think we stop at this data level and we don't go through this extra step of adding some more art on top of it to make it extraordinary amazing I mean I've never really thought that always feels like one comes before the other and I know um a lot of working environments do feel like a factory in that respect that I draw the picture then a developer might implement the picture and then I take it back and say could you change the color back and um but I think I suppose it's about finding a process where both can really feel like they're making a sandwich together in a kitchen rather than it being a conveyor belt it's a little bit similar to when the agile methodologies entered the software world you know where you go through different iterations of the um of the creative process and I agree when there was the situation where first you get get a design out and then you give it to developers to implement it and that's it it's very stressful for both sides because um developers we stressed that the design is not really implementable to be honest like it's not compatible with the technology and then designers are angry because you know developers changed their design and now it's not as pretty as it was before so I think it's all about making it more iterative and more collaborative and then it takes the stress out of both parties and I know there are some there's some tension on on the line every now and then um but to be honest I really like working with designers um there's this app I worked on um in December last year it's Santa Tracker it's um it's a Google app that U kind of tracks the steps of the Santa Claus throughout December up to the culmination day where he goes around the world you know and gives the presents um and there's a lot of apps you can play um in that experience throughout um whole December and I was developing this this up where a little um elf is going through a maze is navigating a maze finding presents and you can look like the you see the elf from the top so it's pretty much just a red dot with a little pointy hat uh kind of and my task was to make it jump through obstacles and I was totally stuck you know because you look from above and it's just this red dot that is ahead how you make a jump like you don't don't see legs you don't see arms I was I was stuck I implemented all the technological parts to it in two days and then for next two weeks I was like blank H how to make it look right and then I asked for designer help and within very short time he came up with the idea that you know if you make the dot bigger and they smaller it looks like you know it's like floating in the air and then falling down this is so brilliant and I never thought about it like you really need to um trust in your competencies you know and ask for help where you need it and what I'd love for us to do is to end up in a world where we have language and ideas that are native to the web itself that embrace the fact that the web is hypertext not just a another way to build native apps