Working Backwards
by admin
First and foremost I call my self a web designer which can or can not be also translated as a web developer. Some designers develop, others just pass things on; I believe in the T shaped principle where I have a specialty but a dynamic range of knowledge that spreads into many different areas like user experience, SEO etc.
All facets of the web intrigue me and talking with a friend Mal Milligan the other day he turned me onto Matt Cutts who is head of Google’s Webspam team. So I decided to watch his video screencast from WordCamp 2007 and WordCamp 2009. Needless to say I was very impressed so thank you Mal for bringing Matt to my attention!
Through watching Matt and thinking about what Joshua Porter said at DelveUI in NYC I realized that sometimes working backwards or even thinking backwards should be integrated more into my daily routine. Joshua (and I am paraphrasing here) was talking about user experience when he said to construct the user interface and interaction first and design later. This reminds me of a shoot first ask questions later approach and I am currently working on a project where I am doing just that.
Specifically I am working on an eCommerce project where we want to see how the user interaction with the site is going to happen and work first, then worry about design later. I think this is really going to work to our advantage because I won’t have a design completed that may potentially need modifications with the changes we are making to the users interaction throughout the site.