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During the development of a software product we all make numerous design decisions. Some decisions are done in early stages of development, while analyzing the requirements and gathering the overall architecture of the product. Other design decisions are done during the lower-level design. Finally, even during the implementation of the a single component, we are often in position to weight several design options against each other.

In the following discussion we will examine one of the common design aspects, which is the source of numerous design dilemmas: should we design the product such that it will be ready for a future change (in the requirements, in technology etc.), or should we settle for a straight forward implementation? When is our product “sufficiently-designed” and when is it “over-designed”? In other words, how can we find the golden path when it comes to designing a software system to be ready for future changes?

Read the article...

I had to post this article below. It was simply so spot-on with regards to the cold, hard realities of design work that I would have been in the wrong for now sharing it….

Direct and Related Links for 'The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School'

Overview

Web development incorporates all areas of creating a Web site for the World Wide Web. This includes Web design (graphic design, XHTML, CSS, usability and semantics), programming, content management, marketing, testing and deployment. The term can also specifically be used to refer to the "back end", that is, programming and server administration.

ref: Wikipedia: Web Development

1. A profession
2. A problem-solving methodology
3. Communication

1. It’s Simple. Design Communicates.
2. Iterative Holistic Communication
3. Defining the Problem

1. Cameron Moll: Design is about communication but cannot exist without a medium of some sort.
2. Veerle Pieters: Design is away of communicating emotions. It expresses feelings so its design.
3. Jon Hicks: Debate how ugly design or no design wins it misses the point that design is about communication.

1. Desirability (human factors)
2. Viability (business factors)
3. Feasibility (technical factors)

1. Business
2. Technology
3. People

1. By addressing the question “What is this?” we communicate usefulness.
2. By addressing “How do I use it?” we communicate usability.
3. By addressing “Why should I care?” we communicate desirability.

I don’t know about you, but I have no creativity. Ask my friends and family. Well this program is pretty exciting because its so easy to use. I’ve often thought about mocking up something in 3D. Say a home improvement project or something. I’ve used several 3D design tools and [...]

This post has been a long time coming. Originally it was going to be an entire series of posts (remember when I used to post more than 5 items a month? Good times), going into an inane amount of detail, and featuring case studies on every single aspect of the featured subject.

It is about doors.

You might be thinking that I couldn't possibly be dull enough to fill post upon post with doors. The idea was going to be to examine what is arguably the most common object in everyday human interaction and go into why it is, pardon my French, fucked up so often. I would start with looking at each component (primarily the handle, but any windows play an important part in interaction) and show how they are usually done so badly as to make the primary task of opening a door more difficult for people.

It was to be an opus on how, by paying attention to the task at hand and examining small details, to best design an object. But all you really need to know is this:

Excluding life threatening situations, door design is the single most common bit of bad design. Remember: handles mean pull, panels mean push. Never change this. For large values of never.

Ever have to design a door? Now you know how. Ever need to design a car, pen, website or anything, bear the above lesson in mind.

Humans have been formulating computational logic for execution on digital microprocessors (aka software development) for just a few years, and some people think that this profession is already a full-fledged engineering discipline.

I think this is not the case yet (by far).

Thinking otherwise actually impede the growth of this line of work into higher level of consciousness that allow us to get out of the same expired and twisted mindsets similar to waterfall-like development processes.

A trait of the infant state of our profession is the frequency of incomplete design work as a significant cause for software development projects failures, incomplete work in a central activity and outcome: design.

A mayor factor for such mediocrity comes from a misunderstanding of the role of abstraction in design work, which leads to incomplete design decisions hence incomplete designs that are supposed to be carried out without any mayor design changes.

A role of abstraction is to manage complexity, focusing on a selected set of design attributes at a given time, ignoring —just for that moment— other equally important attributes; waiting for their turn in the co-evolution process of design.

A professional software designer takes complete design decisions. A design decision is completed when the designer walks the abstraction stack all the way down and returns up to the starting level with a set of implications for that particular decision, turning it to a fully informed and conscious design decision.

The fatal state of affairs for software development projects casting crappy software is when designers do not come back and consider the attributes they left behind in their mental stimulation so-called 'abstracting' or 'modeling'.

So, we all can see that abstraction is not a mean for incomplete or insufficient work; abstraction means putting things aside for the moment, for complexity management purposes, not for leaving aspects of your work in a hang state.