There are some great things happening these days – things are looking up. We are witnessing a great convergence of technologies, one that is more than just interesting or cool. This new convergence finally provides me with the tools – indeed the liberty – to work freely with my business clients without treading on the domain of my IT partners. This new technology allows each role to work within their own area of expertise and lets us optimize our effectiveness as UI designers.

I’m referring to the combination of rich UI technologies (Flex, Air, WPF) and their ability to easily consume data services (SOAP, REST, etc.).

Recently, we had a little user experience design contest here at Factor_UE. The challenge was to design a user experience based entirely on publicly available APIs. Any API would do: mashups were allowed: and if you could call them up locally and get the data, that was allowed to. The point was speed and utility – the development cycle could not be longer than 2 weeks and the user experience should be using those APIs in a completely different way. Those were the rules. Our designers sourced the data, researched their user base, and presented their concepts. (We’ll be posting the concepts later for comment)

Our goals were to test the boundaries of agility using the newest technological approaches and platforms and to see how these would affect the traditional designer/developer roles. Almost all of our designers went in the direction of eliminating the browser from the equation – moving into desktop, mobile, or a combination of the two. While our developers, being UI-technology focused, were involved, the designers were the ones who brought to bear the best way to actually use the data.

This approach does indeed establish new roles and clarify old roles within the development lifecycle. Typically, designers are in constant, often separate, collaboration with back-end developers, user representatives, and business stakeholders – probably reinventing the wheel in terms of data with each group. To be completely honest, user experience designers are often in constant negotiation with everyone involved. This can lead to all kinds of lop-sided applications, depending who wins out in any given argument.

But let’s go back to the Factor_UE designer’s challenge and look at it from a roles perspective. Clearly the premise is that data is available. Data is not useful unto itself, of course, and needs to be combined with some UI to become meaningful to the user. User experience professionals (UI designers, usability analysts), working together with business stakeholders and users, are the best suited for determining “meaningfulness”. Using technologies such as Flex, WPF, AIR, etc., there should be no need whatsoever for heavy-lifting development. The user experience process should be agile and adaptable, with a great deal of exploration around what the experience could be. All of this experimentation can make back-end developers fail, especially considering how expensive it is to build larger systems.

Business analysts and back-end developers, on the other hand, are in a much better position than designers to determine which data is the most useful. They understand scalability, which systems are involved, and how the data can be provided. They know where to find the data, how to pull it together. They can provide documentation for the services, determine what business rules should be baked in, and connect whatever systems together they need to make it happen. If the user experience process uncovers some other data need, well, that can be added later or as time allows.

User experience designers define the user experience, user interface developers develop the UI layer, complete with connections to data (the “how”). Back-end developers and business analysts create the methods and data well from which the UI developers and designers can drink (the “what”), allowing the user experience team the freedom to, in turn, create a great application experience which users will love. To me, this is the best, and the fastest, of all worlds.

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