Exploring Design & Development Processes
One of the most important tools any successful interactive team has in their arsenal is a design & development process. These are the guiding methods through which teams build their products, control their features, establish milestones and deliver to expected outcomes. It is often what sets the team that can build good products apart from others that deliver great experiences.
Years of research have gone into developing process such as these. Biggest question on the onset of a unique project is – where do we start?
Here’s some thought starters:
- How complex is the programming. More complex programming such as text and graphical databases may benefit from a process such as the Rational Unified Process
- Try to determine the scale of your final product. A solution with less then 20 screens may not require the think tank work steps an enterprise solution such as the Macromedia’s Production Management Technique.
- Does your team and your client have a tolerance for the formality of a complex process? The fact is, many do not. In which case it is important to plan accordingly.
Many processes share the same fundamentals. Foundational items such as - discovery, design, development and deploy. (I prefer to use define, design, develop and deliver as it sounds nicer :b) Of course there are subsets and in certain projects, they can become massive extensions. I have found that it is as vitally important for a process to be as modular as the products we build.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve been fortunate in my current position at Hart to have been given the opportunity to redefine this process with the help of fellow teammates. It’s not an easy process. And it will never end. However, by employing this process on every product and continually improving it, we are, in fact, practicing another successful process – iterative design.
This post is merely a small starting point of the process explorations I will post over the next few weeks / months.
