What I want in a next generation design/development platform.

I’ll start with the most obvious - control of the “look and feel”. I think there is a common misconception as to why this is so important. It’s not about ego, it’s about efficiency. I spend at least 50% of my budgeted “design time” on projects not designing but documenting my designs. Then the Developers spend cycles interpreting (or not) my documentation. Then I document the items the Developers misinterpreted, and on and on… It’s wildly inefficient.

Next on the list is control of the page interaction: animation, behaviors, error messaging, tabbing, paging, etc. These are things that are currently much harder to mockup, and extremely tedious to document. Today this is typically done using flash or director, which is time consuming, throw-away work.

Last and certainly not least is user and or system flow. UML, stick figures, and Visio circles and arrows work OK to a point. That “point” being theoretical and not suitable for a full-fledged design review.

I’m looking forward to the day I can hand off final UI to a developer and say “wire it up”

I’m looking forward to the day a frustrated developer snaps at me “I’m not just a data-binder ya know!”