I think PSD-driven development is inherently broken, and this post explains some of the reasons why. It's not really unique to mobile, I've experienced similar on web apps that attempt to be "drop a PSD, now implement this", although maybe the problems are worse in mobile.
I don't really know what the better alternative is, that will meet the social/business/workflow needs that are the reason PSD-driven development happens.
Except that it will involve some attempt to find a way to be more 'agile', as compared to the implied waterfall model in "we give you a PSD and you implement it." Ideally, I don't think they'd be giving you "it should look just like this" PSD's at all. They should be giving you wireframes and appropriate assets as assets. But this will end up being 'more expensive' probably, with more hours spent on back-and-forth and iterations, compared to the waterfall ideal of "here, just do this."
Good software is very 'expensive' (in terms of professional developer hours). It's why we live in a world of really crappy software.
As someone who heads up a user experience team at a decent sized organization, I concur that PSD-driven development and design is dead. If a design isn't in code for people to use and feel, it's not done. It's just a start.
A design can start in Photoshop (or Sketch, more likely), but the iterative process of doing high-fidelity prototypes and getting feedback is how good design is done. We are also talking about interaction design here. It's not how it looks, but how it works and feels. That cannot be accurately modeled with a PSD file.
Our design process starts with hand-drawn sketches or paper prototyping and goes up from there in fidelity. You cannot work in an Agile environment with PSD-drive development.
My team has designers, developers, usability experts and people with a combo of these skills. No one is allowed to work in a silo.
We've been moving to high-fidelity prototypes from PSD-design, it's good.
The days before we moved to PSD-driven development, it was "We need a page with a list of X's, so the user can Y each. It should look sort of like the list of Z's on ABC.com. Build a prototype for next week"... one week of back and forth and a bunch of hacks later..."Ok, the prototype looks good, let's put this in production by Friday."
Bringing in a full time designer and bringing in PSD-driven development was very welcome relief. We still had a week and a Friday, and didn't need to allocate time for prototyping.
Interactive first has the same problem as design first.
I believe both design, interaction and logic could be done agile.
Simplified: The use must login. So we need a screen with a login method. What fields are needed? What should happen on interaction with the form elements? How should the form elements look?
The whole team of graphic, interaction and logic designers work together with the client to make this happen.
We are moving away from high fidelity prototypes to low-fi whiteboard sketches and prototyping in the actual application.
Occasionally we do pixel perfect prototypes with clickable simulated logic and all but we can't maintain it all, and we try to use it only when something is logically complex to reason about without pictures...
It's about as fast to do in the real code with mocked services when you have the application already there.
It requires more collaboration but that can only be a good thing.
I agree going without prototypes or PSD can be a fast way to grow - that's how our company built it's initial MVPs and became profitable in the first place. The PSD's and pixel perfect prototypes come in handy when the non-engineering parts of the company are so intimate with customer's wants, they are very precise about the requirements (especially to fit in an existing market).
Hmm so, it looks to me precise prototypes are good for precise requirements, while vague requirements are better when engineering is also customer development, and customer requirements are not known precisely yet.
In our company we have 1.5 designers and 5 in engineering and we're good with maintaining the prototypes. The designers have to do other non-digital stuff like print media too...Maybe our web applications are mostly CRUD's with permissions so it's easy to maintain?
We have 6 teams with full stack developers and testers, sharing a (too) small group of UX experts. Each group have a product owner focusing on a specific area, but there is a lot of overlap.
But the general idea is to avoid big upfront design and instead try and retry the design.
PSD driven development is insane, but way worse is "not my job" driven development.
As stated in the article, their is a lot of task that no one want to do; like determining goals, slicing png, animations, transitions between views...
When you get a PSD with no hover, no "view when no data", no sense of navigation, no specifications whatsoever.... You know your project will be tough and made of thousand of meetings.
Communication helps, good software helps, being agile does help too. But company does not value well how costly it is to be that much "agile".
Yep, lately more and more, I think the root problem is that actually creating high-quality software is so expensive that few can afford to do it, but they need software anyway.
I think it's actually a big societal problem, not just a contractor-client-relations problem. Our lives are full of crappy software, and the economy probably literally could not bear the cost to fill them with high quality software instead. Software cost savings are a lie formed out of crappy software.
High-quality software isn't expensive - it has a high initial cost, but the difference between a successful product and a crappy product you can't sell and need to hire hundreds of people to bugfix is more than enough to cover this.
Some people tend to want cheap. They don't see what software developers, testers, UX guys and so on bring to the party. Unfortunately they don't really have a choice - they pay now or pay later.
Yes, but you are forgeting a very important decision, usually how these things go, the person doing the decision for now and the person doing the decision later aren't the same one.
So companies keep doing this, because whoever does the "cheap" decision gets his/her bonus for reaching the target and moves on.
High quality, mostly-custom software is expensive.
That's why I thinking bringing everyone as close together produces the best results. Yes, the designer wants X, but is Y acceptable if it's doable in a tenth of the time?
Start focusing on "What's best for the team / product?" rather than only on {whatever hat the asker is wearing}.
High-quality software is a documented way to reduce costs. The evidence is filling books, while there is none that shows that low quality leads anywhere.
This problem is the bane of my existence as a css/html guy. However I don't believe the core problem is what you suggest. Forcing designers to just work within wireframes isn't going to work. Assets and wireframes is only a small part of what a designer does when creating a good user experience.
I think the solution is going to lie somewhere inbetween, with designers needing to expand their knowledge and working within tools that are based on how CSS and HTML actually function instead of a program that allows you to just place boxes wherever you want and hope its easy to code.
I've been following what these guys are doing over at BoxBox, they are onto something big I think. https://keminglabs.com/boxbox/
Ten years ago I had wonderful experiences with Qt Designer. You can build a UI that's an actual UI, you can run it, resize it, click the buttons and all the rest. And then that becomes the real UI - in development you connect up the buttons and the like to the business logic.
Yes, I think if the designer is going beyond wireframes, they should probably be doing CSS themselves. Ideally applying CSS to a live prototype that the 'programmer' developed based on the wireframe.
I don't know, I'm not sure what the solution is. But I'm pretty sure it's not PSD-driven development.
I assume when referring to PSD-driven development you mean to say the process of having a designer design a non-responsive, static mockup which is delivered the the front end dev team? I think this is important to clarify because a lot of people tout Sketch as being the answer despite it having the exact same pitfalls and issues Photoshop does.
Check out this demonstration. I really think this is going to be the next big step forwards for designers. I don't think they need to fully understand CSS, the box model, flexbox, the dom, inheritance, etc to deliver effective designs. They just need to be forced to follow these limitations of these things within the design tool itself.
I think the idea is to make every change the designer makes reflect a nearly identical change that the frontend devs are going to have to also make. For example, text color inheritance is a notoriously hard thing for a designer to grasp. If that was handled automatically for them, they are going to out of necessity, create a more code friendly color inheritance hierachy in their designs.
Maybe a "web" designer really needs to know their medium.
A sculptor needs to know about clay and ovens, a clothes designer needs to know how to sew, the strengths and weaknesses of different fabrics and so on (even if Gaultier or Lagerfeld didn't do any sewing and stitching when they made it big, you bet they learned to when they were apprentice designers). Knowing your medium makes you aware of the limitations and possibilities and a better designer.
Why do we insist on coddling designers with tools like Photoshop? What's wrong with making them learn CSS and HTML?
All mobile graphics should be in vector form. There's no excuse for raster except photos. And if we are talking about vectors, it's easy to use them and everything's pixel-perfect.
Yeah easy. Unfortunately vector drawables are API21+ on Android. A large chunk of my users aren't on API21+. Google helpfully provides app compatibility with older versions by rasterizing to all possible dpi sizes during the gradle build process which makes your apk huge of course and defeats the purpose of vector drawables. So you probably want to try a third party library instead of vector drawables. The most popular one seems to be badaboom/androidsvg. It requires setup code on every imageview to load. So you probably want to use a custom view to make it easier and avoid repeating code everywhere. Of course then you use other libraries that aren't setup to use those custom views and your back to manually rasterizing in code. Easy!
I am more pointing out that it is not so black and white, since designs can include images/bitmaps/patterns etc so just saying "svg it" doesn't really cut it.
But yeah, it is easier to make it work and it can be non-flat as well.
There's a lot that's slightly off about this (though there is also some good material in here too, and clearly it's coming from a place of frustration based on real projects - perhaps, I suspect, without a huge amount of experience of the grass on the other side...), but one bit that particularly struck me was:
When a client wants to build a web app, they understand they need to have a good design, build the pretty HTML and CSS, with a server in the backend, and some dev-op to keep the app running.
Really? Because I'd be glad to introduce you to many of my clients who absolutely do not understand any of that; in fact I had a conversation with a client just two days ago where I explained, patiently and not for the first time, what it was one of my backend developers actually did on a day-to-day basis, and why that sometimes didn't translate into something visible he could actually click on in his browser.
Most of my clients really just want a complete solution (often involving design) and they don't know or care at all about HTML, CSS, AWS, or Postgres.
Mobile MVPs done by lone developers on a contract basis should be about getting something palatable and pleasant that works, not drop shadows and exacting transparency effects. Save that for a second version or when you have enough of a budget to get a designer that knows her way around interface builder. Getting too caught up in making a MVP pixel perfect is a cause of failure for both client and developer.
Mobile MVPs done by lone developers on a contract basis should be about getting something palatable and pleasant that works
Truth be told, something palatable and pleasant that works can be a very, very high bar from a UX perspective. When software collides with the real world, you get a lot of complexity. Even organizations the size of Google and Apple can't produce a Maps app that doesn't do wacky stuff that seems designed to frustrate the user while trying to get someone killed. By comparison, how something looks is dirt cheap. (As usual, it's far cheaper to signal quality than it is to build it.)
When it has to deal with the "real world," mobile QA and UX is hard, and doing it to a high level is probably greatly underestimated in cost while being quite expensive. They say a picture is a thousand words, and seeing it yourself is a few more orders of magnitude. If your only feedback is logging/callbacks/snippets of text from users, you're only getting a small sliver of the true picture.
For Android implementations, if you pay attention to the Material Design guidelines, even if you don't have a good designer on the team, it probably won't suck. It might be pedestrian and form-oriented, with less direct manipulation than it should. But it won't look awful.
This. For design-challenged people like me those guidelines are lifesavers. Ironically, I'm not a big fan of Material personally but it helps a lot to have these kind of guidelines handed down to me.
Your maps example is a straw man - everyone knows Maps is incredibly complex - not a small MVP. And your point about how hard it is to get things right further exemplifies my point which is not to get too caught up in pixel perfect details. There's no time/money/energy for that.
If your bar is too high on the UX side, as a lone contract programmer who is NOT the designer, you probably will have the same problems shipping as the person described in the article. Real artists ship. Lone consultants cannot do Apple/Google/Microsoft/well funded startup level UIs where there's a guy who's only job on the project is the interaction between code and design.
Your maps example is a straw man - everyone knows Maps is incredibly complex - not a small MVP.
Not at all a straw man. Maps might be much, much larger than a small MVP, but Google and Apple have a lot more resources than a lone contract developer. You are the one getting caught up with scale. I'm talking about the increased complexity of apps when they have to bump up against the real world. I've been greatly offended and materially affected by seemingly arbitrary choices made by a developer on a username field. Namely, that starting to edit the username field would blank out the password field, instead of doing this on start-edit of the password field. In a time critical situation on low-bandwidth, this can leave a user with a password vault cursing, high and dry, while the app starts this kafkaesque cycle of doing the most annoying thing.
Lone consultants cannot do Apple/Google/Microsoft/well funded startup level UIs where there's a guy who's only job on the project is the interaction between code and design.
If the aim is to make a substantive tool that stands up to real-world complexity in UX, someone, somewhere is going to have to spend a lot of time testing the heck out of it and make careful observations. Otherwise, the lone consultant is just going to check off the requirements, call it a day, and bill. The only alternative is to be really good about feedback, and implement in such a way that corrections can be distributed in a matter of a few hours or less.
Citation, please. I deal with clients on a regular basis who think that software with 20+ years of time invested can be duplicated by 1-2 engineers working for 3-6 months.
Earlier today, I had to give a rough estimate on writing a custom app that can read, write, share and sync arbitrary CAD files, and explain why building all of that might not be the best approach.
This was my thought too. A lot of the times I suggest doing a hybrid app for the MVP. It is an easier and more affordable way of getting a functional and decent looking app to market. Allows the client to test and fine tune more easily. Oftentimes after launch they stick with the hybrid app because it gives them enough of what they need. Other times they decide to proceed to native but now have a much better idea on what they really need/want and saved tons of money in the process.
I tried to put together a workable MVP as quickly as possible. The designs that I thought were aspirational designs for a finished product that would be completed eventually, but no, the CEO really wanted all of the fancy transparency, the exact button spacing, the exact imagery and fonts (despite the fact that they used fonts that weren't licensed for app usage...sigh...).
So we spent tons of time that was supposed to be MVP instead making a polished final product.
And then the CEO threw a new set of art to us and asked for a third redesign (ours was apparently the second, after the initial developer resisted making major design changes). And then a FOURTH redesign.
It amazes me that this guy (continues!) to get funding. But he's managed it. :|
I always felt that Interface Builder is _for_ designers who want to visualize and use something (only somewhat) closer to photoshop. A developer might more likely come at it from the other direction, not even touching IB and doing it all in code, then maybe adding modular IB elements when the layouts start to make the code unmanageable.
If you're not using interface builder as a developer, you're wasting a huge amount of time. Doing advanced screens (mostly) through code makes sense, but often it's a lot faster to use IB for putting together / building the more basic parts of an app.
I totally agree. I wanted to expand a little on basic vs advanced screens, and suitability for IB.
At work we had two teams who had very different opinions of IB's usefulness. In our case, it was based on the nature of each application. IB does not provide much value when the majority of the screen is dynamically determined: different elements based on user preferences, locale, document contents, etc. The team that disliked IB, their app was almost all dynamic (and lists/tables, whose cells were also fairly dynamic).
Our team, on the other hand, had a very static UI. It had very little runtime customization (other than the contents of labels, images, etc). We loved IB.
And then child ViewControllers came along, and made it easier to mix static/dynamic content on the same screen.
I haven't used UIStackView yet, but I suspect it also will help with screens that contain dynamic content.
This is a good point. I've been dealing almost exclusively with highly dynamic UIs, and that's almost certainly skewed my perception of IB's usefulness.
We built our designs on a modular approach where each element is contained in a tableview cell, so that part is done by code. The cells themselves make use of Auto Layout though.
While I absolutely hated AL at first (and the IB just plain sucks) I do find it very time-saving once it clicked.
For small to medium changes, by reading the XML. Everything is named sanely, and the XML hierarchy matches the view hierarchy. Constraints can be a little hard to understand, because they use opaque identifiers, but it's possible. I'll occasionally have to open the storyboard/NIB in Interface Builder to confirm/disprove something.
For large changes, it can be unmanageable. But large changes are hard to code review anyway, so we try to avoid those.
Interesting. I've worked with a few designers who had Xcode _installed_, but they were mostly using it for the Simulator. Using IB wasn't something they were comfortable with. I'd be really impressed with somebody who's a Sketch/Photoshop wiz coming over to IB and being productive.
On the flip side why would a non-developer bother to install Xcode and learn IB when they can export their ideas directly from Sketch/Photoshop into clickable "prototypes"?
Back when IB was a separate tool, I'd agree with you. I'm not going to look for old docs, but I'm pretty sure I ran across something from six or seven years ago that mostly said, "IB can be used by non-programmers to make a UI, and then dev can create the code to hook to the IBActions.", or something like that.
Whether it was written down or not, it seems like a good idea in theory. The old, stand-alone IB wasn't all that hard to figure out (though struts and springs might bring the death of your sanity). Get the UI all prettied up, and hook up an implementation behind it. Not that I've ever seen that in practice, however.
The problem is the waterfall approach of client->designer->developer. If the first line of code is written after there's a supposedly "finished" Photoshop or Sketch document, the project is doomed to run into all the fundamental design issues explained in this post.
Yet often that seems like the only way to the client, who thinks that they can't afford a programmer in the "planning" or "design" phase... Even though it leads to an unpredictable budget explosion in the latter stages.
One solution is to have better tools for app design. Instead of PSDs and handwaving static Invision clickthroughs, there should be a tool that allows an app prototype to be modelled using real code and native mobile concepts like navigation controllers and list views.
It's not perfect (the code generation can never match a veteran programmer's style), but for prototypes often good enough - and much more powerful than clickthroughs.
Btw, Neonto is considering switching to React Native for the generated projects. If someone's interested in that, give a shout to hello@neonto.com and voice your opinion!
As a mobile dev, this article kind of irritates me. It seems like the author is trying to shift his responsibilities to the client or designer. Here some tips:
- wireframe first. At least on a whiteboard. Build the interface with stock or ugly controls from that, iterate the interaction. Only once that is done, send ugly screenshots to the designer to beautify.
- I believe that every dev should have photoshop, and know the basics. You shouldn't need a 24 hour turnaround to cut an asset or fix a small issue.
- actually talk to the designer. Don't make the client be a middleman. When you feel a screen is done, review it with design first. Try for pixel-perfect accuracy, but don't get too hung up on it, often a five minute chat can suggest alternatives that save hours of work.
- always decide what screens will work in landscape, or portrait, or both, up front. This is easy to forget and sometimes difficult to retrofit.
- not the only approach but one that works for me, pick one device (screen size) to be the "hero" device for a project, and build for that first, then go back and and adapt for the rest. This works better if its a more constrained device, as adapting to a larger/faster device is easier. I often use a 5c as the target.
I disagree about every dev needing to have photoshop and knowing the basics - even though I personally have done this in the past i have found it to ultimately be a waste of time - something looks simple enough to change, sometimes you get lucky, it is, other times, 20 minutes later you're looking through photoshop menus/dropdowns. The designer know these tools the best, I'd rather take your third point and talk to the designer and communicate that you need him/her to be available to work through these points. There's so much for a developer to know and be focused on without having to learn to use the designer's tools as well.
Just like the designer would benefit from knowing how code works, don't you think the developer would benefit from knowing how photoshop works?
I find it kind of interesting that a developer would even feel a reluctance to understand one of the basic methods used to deliver to them what they need to develop.
You are missing out on great opportunity to have an informed opinion, think about alternatives, find potential business ideas from something thats not optimal and in general just have a better and more productive relationship with designers.
I at least realized that learning to code as a designer, even just a little bit, both taught me a great deal of how to build things for developers, help them solves problems that might require a different way to think about the technical issue of something and not do stuff that are completely retarded and impossible to do.
No they are actually benefits from learning photoshop because you understand what they are doing more technically. Adding a drop-shadow as an example. Or doing a gradient with specific ratio, angle and so on.
You literally get access to the very parameters and their values you might have to use.
It's not about learning how to use photoshop. It's learning how photoshop works, just like I learn code to understand how most code work. That doesn't mean I would call myself a developer who can code like a pro.
> In a web app, you’re either the frontend or backend developer. In a mobile app, you’re the app developer.
Maybe if you're part of a bigger team. But if you're working on an app of the same scale as this hypothetical mobile app - where you have a single client who has a designer - you're pretty likely to be doing all of the front-end stuff as well.
Yeah, this article reminded me exactly of what it was like to do smaller scale web development. When I got to that exact line in the article, I had the same thought as you. There really isn't much of a distinction.
I think if you're on any project that has a 3rd party photoshop designer it's going to go just like this whether it's mobile, web, or even desktop.
> Mobile development = frontend development + backend development + dev-op.
Sorry no, being a mobile developer does not mean doing backend and devops any more than being a web developer does. In some cases you might have to do it, and in some cases you might not. But there's nothing inherently easier about the web.
Furthermore I find the whining about different iPhone vs iPad layout differences to be quite ignorant of everything except iOS development. There is no more controlled environment than iOS. Try developing for Android some time. And don't get me started on cross-browser, cross-platform responsive web design.
The bottom line is no development is easy, it's all a mess everywhere you look. It looks pretty bad when you try to extrapolate the warts from your particular corner of the dev world into an assertion that other developers have it easier. Doing good development work is just plain hard, even when working with equal share stakeholders and with none of the trust and workflow issues associated with clients.
The difficulty of converting a Photoshop design to an actual UI reminds me of this passage from Paul Graham's essay "The Power of the Marginal" [1]:
> For example, it recently emerged that the famous glass artist Dale Chihuly hasn't actually blown glass for 27 years. He has assistants do the work for him. But one of the most valuable sources of ideas in the visual arts is the resistance of the medium. That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. In principle you could make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers you. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this.
In the case of mobile app development, it's probably best to let the constraints and idioms of the platform, which the developer knows best, steer the design. So maybe part of the solution, contrary to what the article suggests, is to further collapse roles; maybe the developer should do the design, too.
A lot of comments in the thread are commenting that the developer should be able to slice up PSDs, but why not go further and be responsible for the design and interaction. It requires empathy for the user and, let's say 100 hours spent on understanding fonts, colour and layout.
The constraints of the platform should absolutely guide the design. Fight those constraints and the app will feel weird on the platform.
Most designers won't know the constraints of the platform, or won't care; they want to make a design that's unique and beautiful and all that. The client (or any human being) will look at the pretty pictures and love it. The eventual user of the software _won't care at all_.
Designers make pretty stuff that demos well. Those designs are usually a lot more work to pull off in code, though. In the middle of implementing those designs, all I'm thinking is, "What a waste of money. No user is going to care about this [animation|screen transition|custom look|beautiful settings screen]."
This applies to web and mobile and desktop apps.
Look at the apps you use everyday. They're probably boring to look at.
At the least, if you're in the client position, get a designer and developer together at the same time to hash out the app. You can probably get something that looks decent, works well and costs less.
The first half of the post applies to web development too. Most designers design for the 'best case' scenario and leave out all the tiny details like error conditions, interactions, too much/little content, various screen sizes and touch vs mouse interactions (hover especially).
Let's face it, nowadays unless you are designing a content site there is an immense amount of work needed to handle all the complexities of designing a web or mobile app. This is why things like Bootstrap or other frameworks are so popular, they allow a designer or developer to cover 90% of those scenarios and focus on the important things.
> This is why things like Bootstrap or other frameworks are so popular, they allow a designer or developer to cover 90% of those scenarios and focus on the important things.
You're definitely right, but this IMO this is a broken model.
Most of the times superior web apps and mobile apps are the ones with extremely well curated UX, maybe even featuring a slim UI. OFC is the product is very revolutionary, you can be still successful with trade-offs in UI/UX, but the second one is far more important than the first one, if you have a shining, super cool bootstrap template, but a horrifying UX, people will definitely walk away and never return. If you have a decent UI, but an outstanding UX, they will stay and give you suggestions (implicit and explicits) in how to improve the UI as well.
That doesn't impugn the model. Using Bootstrap to cover the 90% case, rather than building from scratch, lets you spend more time and effort on solid UX, rather than having to reinvent basic UI from the ground up.
Oh man this felt awfully familiar. I am so happy I left iOS consulting work and instead built in house apps so I don't have to deal with stupid customers and designer detached from reality.
In retrospect I think they should leave a bit more design decision to developers and let them throw up a minimum design first. A design which works well within the constraints and technologies of the platform. Then designer can come with input on how to change that.
It is astonishing how much faster you can build an app if you don't have to care about getting the UI pixel perfect according to some designers pipe dream of what it should look like.
Customers should know this, because I don't think they have any idea of how expensive it is to insist on very particular details of how the UI looks. If you give more freedom and choices in how the design should be to the developer you can get an app for a fraction of the price which is easier to maintain.
Oh how the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence! As a web developer, I'm used to hearing about how mobile app development is so much better because there's a sane layout system and you don't need to deal with crufty old CSS. And how it's so easy to get native functionality, and the UI is easy to make run at the coveted 60FPS, etc.
Nice to be reminded that as lucky as us developers are in the grand scheme of things, we still have hard jobs and changing your tools or platform won't solve all your problems but rather just gives you different problems :)
Part of me wants to grab these clients and shake them while yelling "You are a software company, why are you farming out your core competency!?!?" These problems arise because the client thinks that the software portion of their business is just a tiny part of the picture. If the only thing your clients use to do business with you is your mobile app, then you are a software company. Full stop.
Why the hell did they hire a designer? They need a product manager. And why are they building the entire solution in one shot? Build it in small pieces and iterate.
That might not be so terrible. GP was suggesting it was due to cost, which is a "run away like the building was on fire" signal, IMO.
If all management knows is powerpoint, that's what they should use to communicate their ideas. It's no different than if all they knew was a napkin and pencil sketch.
I is due to cost. I am aware of a few projects that were done with trial versions of the software stack, almost all the way up to a few months before delivery date.
Well, to be honest, in the last year a lot of designers have moved to Sketch or similar alternatives, but it's still very common to work with plain screens as start point when working as contractor.
Sketch-driven development is not that much better. It is easier to get from design to app, but then edge cases and real data start to interfere with vision and you are doomed anyway.
I think it's a bit naive if you think that Web Developers are cleanly split into Frontend and Backend. Most of the developers I know, like myself, are Fullstack. According to the Stack Overflow developer survey[1] there's more Fullstack developers than any other kind of developer.
It just bothers me that the implication I got from your article was: "This is why mobile is tougher than Web." You might think: "Alright but web doesn't deal with some stuff mobile does, like offline data sync", but web does deal with stuff that mobile doesn't have to consider, like making sure your application is secure from XSS attacks, making sure all your backend endpoints prevent Overposting attacks, and other security considerations.
And if you are freelance, usually web also has to handle devops. Although sometimes the client does have their own setup.
Web also deals with considerations you don't in Mobile in general. Web is also very prone to failure if you don't plan carefully.
On the other hand the part that mentions that you should break your development into tasks is absolutely spot on. When I take a job I plan how I'm going to do the entire application in my head, writing it down in the process, then and only should do I give an estimate. It might be the single most important practice in my job as a consultant.
Just like the designer would benefit from knowing how code works, so would a designer benefit from know how a developer works.
The biggest issue isn't lack of communication but lack of understanding each other.
I find it kind of interesting that a developer would even feel a reluctance to understand one of the basic methods used to deliver to them what they need to develop.
You are missing out on great opportunity to have an informed opinion, think about alternatives, find potential business ideas from something thats not optimal and in general just have a better and more productive relationship with designers.
I at least realized that learning to code as a designer, even just a little bit, both taught me a great deal of how to build things for developers, help them solves problems that might require a different way to think about the technical issue of something and not do stuff that are completely retarded and impossible to do.
And so now none of my projects fail unless I want them to.
Replacing "Photoshop" with "Design Resources", really slim and useful article I think. Especially agreed to the "design + dev + dev-ops" responsibilities are mostly neglected by the client and should be described within handshake process as described.
I think the author was meaning it more in terms of MVC in the iOS project
- Web dev -
Backend dev scope: Model, Controler
Front end dev scope: views
- Mobile dev -
Where as with an mobile dev, their scope is model, view and controller code (full stack)
Your thinking of it in terms of the whole mobile app being the front end and the rest API being the backend. But the app its self has both "front end" and "backend" code segregation its self
It is a grey area, all web applications I work on have syncing, caching, local storage and offline support. I can also think of many mobile apps that do not.
no.. that's not why they fail. They fail because the client wants the sky but his budget barely touches the ceiling. Eventually the money runs out and the thing falls flat on its face.
Most fail because clients are lied to. They are shown the high-res print ready Photoshop glossies, and told "yes, you can have this, it will use all these assets. And lots of browser control overriding interactions". Then they try to actually build it, it is slow, uses the whole months bandwidth allowance for the mobile user "my whole 10GB gone? But I only browsed the web..", and will crumble under load.
The real problem is letting designers near the web. They were OK on print, well, a lot of printers had problems with the designers as well. Hmm. Maybe it is just the designers.
PSD driven development is still a thing? Ugh. What tools are out there to build the UI scenegraph directly from production assets? (there is Rightware for automotive displays)
The client is unable to understand the technical challenges, while the developer cannot read the client's mind. Not a mystery why the project in story failed.
I am more familiar with AndroidStudio than iOS programming, and it just feels like a hackish piece of software. It looks like Eclipse, and the code is Java, but it's really a stripped down version of Java with a lot of hacks and work arounds. It seems like so much time is spent negiotating with the operating system.
Coding shit from PSDs is like making a car from a drawing a 3 year old made. It's so fucking stupid that only a 3 year old wouldn't realize it's probably the most retarded way to design an app.
If your designer knew how to design apps they wouldn't be making PSDs, just like no car designer would substitute photoshop for clay. The only thing Photoshop is appropriate for designing is static images / webpages.
Interesting article for me as I just rolled out an app for a client and a lot of this feels familiar.
Firstly I was lucky I didn't have a PSD driven design, but my client demanded a fixed price quote, so I insisted they pay me to do fairly comprehensive spec, including a clickable wireframe prototype, bdd behaviour spec, architecture design, background, requirements, objectives....
I went with lo-fi hand drawn pages which I scanned and wired up as a clickable prototype via https://marvelapp.com/
In the end it was fairly successful for me, as the comprehensive spec allowed me to estimate fairly accurately.
However I don't think it was the most cost effective outcome for the client. Because of their rigid nature, instead of collaborating through the process (aside from the specification phase of course), I built them exactly what we agree and invoiced them and was paid. However, within a week of the first pilot they had come up with about 100 hours worth of changes they wanted.
In the end I spent about 100 hours in the spec / design phase (which I was paid by the hour), 300 hours building the app (which was a fixed price) and now I have about 100 hours of changes to make.
If we had worked to a budget rather than a fixed price, then by my estimate I would have spent about 400 hours collaborating and iterating (basically removing about 90% of the time creating and writing a spec) and they would have had an app which they were involved in crafting the whole way through. Basically I think they have blown about 100hours and they have to live with lots of little nuances that they would have otherwise been able to decide upon.
Really great explication of the collapsing of responsibilities of mobile development. Remedies, as always, involve educating the client. Makes sense to me.
I feel like I must be on crazy pills for suggesting that the designer's deliverable should be something like UWP XAML documents. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to do any fancy data binding, but they should be able to at least lay things out and maybe manually fill in some dummy data.
You realise that you have failed to communicate your requirements to the client, failed to do due diligence on the requirements and assets before you signed the contract and badly mis-scoped the project based on your imagination of what non domain experts should know about your field of professional endeavour.
Im so happy that I never ever in my front-end career had to implement some designers PSDs.
The only images I got where mocks with stuff I already implemented but needed some changes...
On the other hand, I consider myself a software and usability engineer, maybe giving greater focus to nontechnical aspects of software has safed me from having to do what a designer tells me to...
Or just ask your designer to work @1x in a vector app like Sketch, and export PDF vector images for import into the asset catalog (Scale Factor - Vector Asset).
For enterprise mobile apps - we are working to address this problem with our docker like container platform with ready pre-built mobile app with a runtime to run your cross platform hybrid web. feel free to ping and I will be happy to share more details.
In our project (actor.im) we successfully separated logic (cross-platform!) and make it work closely with backend team and we cover together all corner cases. Making UI on top of this is very-very easy.
I don't really know what the better alternative is, that will meet the social/business/workflow needs that are the reason PSD-driven development happens.
Except that it will involve some attempt to find a way to be more 'agile', as compared to the implied waterfall model in "we give you a PSD and you implement it." Ideally, I don't think they'd be giving you "it should look just like this" PSD's at all. They should be giving you wireframes and appropriate assets as assets. But this will end up being 'more expensive' probably, with more hours spent on back-and-forth and iterations, compared to the waterfall ideal of "here, just do this."
Good software is very 'expensive' (in terms of professional developer hours). It's why we live in a world of really crappy software.