The voting on session submissions for the MIX 10 conference in Las Vegas on March 15th-17th has opened! I have submitted one entry around Designer – Developer collaboration, focussing on best practices with the aim to provide an overview of how to keep designers happy and achieve the best possible outcome for your Silverlight applications.
It’s my intention that this would be supported with demos of our real world, existing Silverlight (2 and 3) applications, and the content comes from the experience we’ve gained at i2Q/Synetrix over the last two years we’ve spent working with Silverlight.
Please cast your vote here and help me spread the word on…
“Baking a great Silverlight UX: the recipe for successful designer-developer collaboration”
Abstract:
In order to make the most of a User-Experience focussed platform like Silverlight, we need to adopt a design-led development process.
To achieve this successfully requires close communication and collaboration between designers and developers. We have the tool in Expression Blend, but how do we best utilise it to ensure the end solution remains true to the vision?
Find out some of the best practice and tips of complex Silverlight application development, learn how to avoid the pitfalls and enable designers to best leverage this powerful toolset for a great user experience.
Draft Outline:
- User-centric design
- Keeping the user in mind at all times, focussing on how best to help them achieve their goals. Which in turn leads to a…
- UX led development
- Where the user requirements and client specification inform the interface and workflow (in the View), which in turn informs the interaction and logic (in the ViewModel)
- MVVM FTW!
- Not technical, but what the benefits are from a designer’s point of view, and what it means for “Blendability”
- Blendability
- How easy it is to view and edit a data-bound user control, custom control or template from within Expression Blend. (Not whether or not you can turn an iPhone into a smoothie)
- Communication & understanding
- Ongoing, regular and close collaboration between designer and developer in the context of an agile, iterative development process.
- Improved results
- The combination of all of the above empowers the designer to exert greater control over the evolution of the application’s user experience.
Take Away:
At the end of this session attendees will take away an understanding of the real world benefits of user-centric design with a Model-View-ViewModel architecture, and practical tips on how to achieve the best possible end result through effective collaboration.
Knowledge Areas:
Silverlight, MVVM, designer-developer workflow, Expression Blend
Level of this presentation:
Aimed at beginner to intermediate practitioners, maybe of interest to advanced Silverlight developers / designers too, dependent on their current working practices.