At the recent “Computer Arts in
association with Microsoft: Designing The Next Generation of User Experiences”
conference, Microsoft presented the tools that will help us create the ‘brave
new world’ where user interfaces are rich, beautiful, usable and a pleasure to
use.
Microsoft Expression tools
comprises
Graphic Designer,
Interactive Designer and
Web Designer.
Graphic
Designer is a tool for creating vector and raster graphics. It’s a mixture of
Adobe’s
Photoshop and
Illustrator. It’s not a match against such
tried and tested, mature products but that’s not its USP. That would be
XAML. XAML is Microsoft’s version of a
user interface markup language and it’s a key component of the
Windows Presentation Foundation
(WPF). WPF and XAML are both vector-based technologies and this means goodbye
to the limitations of 2-D bitmaps. So, visual designers use
Graphic Designer.
Web
Designer was really impressive as HTML editors go. Front-end developers
constantly moan about how
Dreamweaver doesn’t produce clean and
standard compliant code.
Web Designer
has focused on sorting out this bugbear and providing superior handling of CSS.
The control and transparency of the development environment means even the most
careless coders make few mistakes and that debugging is no longer so
hit-and-miss. It’s quite clear that web designers/developers use
Web Designer.
This
leaves us with
Interactive
Designer – the tool that really interests me. People seem to think this is
a “
Flash-killer”.
It is a foray into rich media development for Microsoft but it does not compete
directly with Flash (
WPF/E might though!). I would say it’s more equivalent to something like
Flex Builder.
What Microsoft has done is integrate
Interactive
Designer tightly with WPF, which means it is hooked directly into Windows
operating system. With
Interactive
Designer, you can design full-scale applications. If you wanted to re-do Photoshop in this, you could.
Sounds like something for everyone then.
What intrigues me most is who should be using
Interactive Designer. It has two modes – the design view and the
code view. The idea being that designers can do the pretty pictures and then
the developers code up the functionality and wire it to the back-end. Is that
the utopia for rich media application development? Do things really work that
way? Come to think of it, what’s happened to the usability guy or the
interaction designer? Hmm, interaction designer (
what’s that?),
that looks suspiciously close to
Interactive
Designer. Is that who should be using this bit of software?
There’s obviously some confusion
here. Partly, it’s the fact that the world is changing and so we need to change
with it and partly it’s because designers have traditionally not done it the
Microsoft way.
Interactive Designer will
be great for Windows developers. It shares common UI elements with other
Microsoft developer tools. Designers, on the other hand, will have to get used to how
Interactive Designer handles timelines
and key frames, to thinking in terms of objects (e.g. a list box control)
rather than flat graphics, to dealing with the collection of files in a project
rather than a single PDF or FLA file, and that the ‘rich design surface’ is not
as rich as what you get in, say, Flash or After Effects (I’ve no doubt it’ll get there but it’ll
take a while).
Anyway, back to who uses
Interactive Designer… In many cases
it’ll be a front-end developer’s tool. Visual designers will continue to use
Photoshop and
Illustrator with a plug-in that exports XAML and pass the visuals
on to developers. The more techie-minded designers (maybe even Flash ones) will venture into using
Interactive Designer but will need to
accept a more Microsoft approach and also adopt more of a programmer’s mindset.
After all, they need to speak the same language and work seamlessly together. This should
make design and development more tightly coordinated and potentially speed up turnaround times. I guess, in the brave new world, unless the interaction
designer wants to get his hands dirty, he’ll just have to stick with paper and Visio.