Techniques – In My Experience

Very early in my career, I made the mistake of applying for a job that put more emphasis on the tool used for the work than the person needed. “Mac Operator required” read the headline.

It wasn’t false advertising. I got the job, and true enough the work was operating a Mac in a sweatshop environment, producing terrible ad artwork and even more terrible brochure artwork. My design career barely survived.

Some years later, I became particularly adept at Adobe Flash (then Macromedia Flash) . The software allowed designers to indulge in creating websites and web applications that broke out of the constraints of a standard web browser.

The more I saw myself as an advanced user, the more each new feature became a chance to showboat my skills. The software’s capabilities began to lead my design work. I had a hammer, and all I could see were nails. Thankfully, by the time Steve Jobs kick-started Flash’s death spiral, I had moved on to embrace process and my toolkit was well beyond whatever Adobe were selling at that particular time.

The lesson I learned from these situations was not to allow your contributions as a designer to be defined by the tools you use.

This came to mind watching the Adobe/Figma story send shockwaves through the design industry last week. I remain unmoved.

If interaction design practice has deteriorated to the point where it relies so heavily on a single design tool, something is badly wrong.

I get just how good a tool Figma is. I get that a whole generation of designers in their early careers have known nothing other than Figma as the de facto tool of their trade. And it has earned that place. That should not make it a prerequisite for design.

Anyone unsettled about Figma’s future might use this as a reminder to stay sharp.

Don’t over-invest in a single design tool. Don’t conflate your value as a designer with technical ability in a software package.

Software will come and go. Your true value will endure.

Changing the way we work

We’ve recently been working on a major project with a client whose main office is 100 miles away. While physical visits are not an issue, sometimes we want to build up momentum working, and ask the client for feedback on the way. To facilitate this, we’ve elected to use two online apps for different sides of the design process.

For interface design visuals we’ve been working with Onotate, built by the folks at Rumble Labs. We’ve been using the just-out-of-beta app for feedback and collaboration with up to 6 other reviewers and editors. Onotate shows interface designs in the relevant context – a web browser – and notes can be added by dragging cross-haris across the desired area of the screen.

On the other side of the process, HotGloo has been our weapon of choice for wireframing and interactive prototypes. A brilliant tool, it makes creating interactive prototypes a breeze and, like Onotate, it can accommodate feedback in the form of onscreen notes.

We’ve found a number of benefits to using these tools, which apply to both of them.

– They encourage brevity: the comment boxes are just the right size and discourage lengthy essays on particular point
– They encourage more immediate feedback: it’s simple for the reviewer to leave a comment there and then rather than have to switch to an email window and remember everything there
– They help keep debate transparent: with multiple reviewers, it’s often too easy for the real discussions to take place in multiple emails, or in some other ‘unofficial’ forum. Threads can be created there on the tool, and keeps everyone focussed.
– They save on confusion: If someone else has already made a point, another reviewer is unlikely to repeat it

We had only made moderate use of these tools before now; beyond this point though, there is a good chance that the way we work will have been permanently affected, very much for the better.