The Designer's guide to building software

How to work with Developers to build amazing software

Transcript

1. The Designer’s guide to building Software IKE
2. don’t understand software development A lot of Designers ...
3. don’t understand software development … even some software developers. A lot of Designers ... people  
4. We’re about to fix all this Don’t feel bad. (famous. last. words.)
5. #whoami
6. First, some Questions.
7. What is software? Programs that tell a computer how to do something
8. System software. Programming software. *Application software* Types of software?
9. Application Software? That sounds a lot like “apps” …
10. Apps? Desktop Apps. Mobile Apps. *Web Apps* aka “software”
11. Website vs Web app
12. Why is Software hard? (This is not an existential question)
13. “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know” — *former* United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
14. Why is Software hard? Unknown Unknowns are a KILLER!
15. Why is Software hard? Coming up with estimates are hard and …
16. “L’enfer, c’est les autres” Jean  Paul  Sartre  
17. Just kidding …
18. “Hell is other people” Jean  Paul  Sartre    
19. Methods of building software Agile. Waterfall. Big Design. Iterative
20. What’s the right way?! (This is an existential question)
21. How I like to do it Design. Discuss. Prototype. Argue. Write Tests. Code. Find problems. Regroup. Code more. Manual Testing. Fix bugs. Release. Drink. Profit. Party. Rinse. Repeat.
22. How to do it wrong? Bad estimates Long times between checkins Not involving the developers No collaborative tools Bad. Hard dates.
23. What the designer should know You don’t need to know how to program … but you need to know the medium you’re designing for
24. What the designer should know Native mobile vs mobile web Touch screen vs mouse Page loads vs Ajax Android vs ios vs Windows phone etc
25. What the designer should know *Don’t* try to keep up with less, sass, css, haml css3, html5, jquery, dojo, spine, backbone, Ember.js, jsonp, sugar.js, AIR, WPF …
26. What the designer should know Front-end Development is *now* very specialized. It didn’t used to be, so designers could work on front end code
27. What the designer should know Focus on acquiring ui/ux knowledge … but picking up technical knowledge never hurts. makes it harder to be bullshitted.
28. My Advice? You’re not Steve Jobs.
29. My Advice for working with Developers? If you want something. Ask nicely. Explain. Get them to help you win.
30. My Advice? Ask A LOT of questions. People like to talk about their work
31. Albert Einstein I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious
32. My Advice? Never tell a developer *HOW* to do something, unless you’re prepared for war.
33. My Advice? Learn how to use collaborative tools. Skype. Campfire. Basecamp.
34. My Advice? Learn how to write bug reports and use JIRA or Lighthouse
35. My Advice? Learn the importance of testing and regressions.
36. The Future •  Node.js. Evented programming •  Scaling. Concurrency. Big Data. •  html5 •  The Rise of Mobile •  *Responsive design *  h.p://speakerdeck.com/u/malarkey/p/fashionably-­‐flexible-­‐responsive-­‐web-­‐design-­‐full-­‐day-­‐workshop-­‐1  
37. Questions Now with Answers!
38. <Applause />
39. Thanks! Twitter: @concept47 Email: ike@concept47