Designing ...why be a desginer
What are the qualities of a desginer ?
Analytic mind ; a mind that can capture the patterns, decode them and also apply them ? yes .......
Skill .....definitely .....without physical attributation abstract designs are castles in the air...
Art .......maybe not exactly because therein lies the difference between art and design.
Art is an extension of the artist himself......an art form is created for the self satisfaction of the artist. Its beauty while evident to the world is actually meant for the artist himself / herself to revel in.
A Design is different in that sense. A design is meant for OTHERS. The designer needs a quality more than the ones above and that is SENSITIVITY.
A design is a utility object. Meant to satisfy the ones using it. And so the first thing that a desginer should think of is how can the design cature the expressed and unexpressed needs of the users using it.
We in IT especially in Fin Services design systems. And so we must be focussed to our users and accept that our systems are USEFUL to the users.
This does not mean we must accpet all their requests for they are not an expert on software solutions ...we are.
So we must listen to all their requests and try to find out solutions ourselves. Accepting all their suggestions is dangerous. At the same time dismissing all their requests as low prioirty
is dangerous as we are not the experts on the domain side ...they are, so we cannot decide the priorities of what they need.
Important thing is to contain the artist in ourselves. Brilliant coders have brilliant ideas and also the techical gumption to pull them off. But best of code sometimes becomes useless becasue our users did not want to use it that way and so they will not user it that way.
lets take an example :
I want to design a system for users to display their portfolio of stocks.
Now what do i include ?
Stock names, ticker, Buy/ Sell Price, Current Close price, Profit/loss accrued, status of the stocks ( hold, sold , watch)
I also give an option to set the trigger price whereby if the price exceeds, falls the level then a email or SMS notification is sent to the portfolio users.
Now the user wants to view the top 10 trades on the stock and its consolidated financial data like EPS etc on one click on the Stock Name / Ticker. This is considerable data and the servers that hosts the portfolio management web based system is neither exactly popular for its storage capablities nor performance in case of huge data retrievals......but admit it thats the only server host that you can afford in a 10000/- a year budget !
So what you do ? do you tell the user ....sorry you are very important to us but this cannot be done and risk pissing him off ?
Worse is if we try to employ the technologically infeasible option of giving it to him.
A brilliant techo guy would explore complex grids and web services that can do the job. But then asking the user to do more than clicking a button just to give him the data that he needs for a glance is asking him to do so much. Hey markets move very fast man !
A desginer would be inclined to think ...can i give him a hyperlink on the ticker to an URL that opens up a site like nseindia.com that would give him the top trades and fin data in one single page. If nseindia.com openly publishes data for you why not use it ???
May or may not work but we did try to satisfy the user's requirement but the way we want to do it.
thanks !
Analytic mind ; a mind that can capture the patterns, decode them and also apply them ? yes .......
Skill .....definitely .....without physical attributation abstract designs are castles in the air...
Art .......maybe not exactly because therein lies the difference between art and design.
Art is an extension of the artist himself......an art form is created for the self satisfaction of the artist. Its beauty while evident to the world is actually meant for the artist himself / herself to revel in.
A Design is different in that sense. A design is meant for OTHERS. The designer needs a quality more than the ones above and that is SENSITIVITY.
A design is a utility object. Meant to satisfy the ones using it. And so the first thing that a desginer should think of is how can the design cature the expressed and unexpressed needs of the users using it.
We in IT especially in Fin Services design systems. And so we must be focussed to our users and accept that our systems are USEFUL to the users.
This does not mean we must accpet all their requests for they are not an expert on software solutions ...we are.
So we must listen to all their requests and try to find out solutions ourselves. Accepting all their suggestions is dangerous. At the same time dismissing all their requests as low prioirty
is dangerous as we are not the experts on the domain side ...they are, so we cannot decide the priorities of what they need.
Important thing is to contain the artist in ourselves. Brilliant coders have brilliant ideas and also the techical gumption to pull them off. But best of code sometimes becomes useless becasue our users did not want to use it that way and so they will not user it that way.
lets take an example :
I want to design a system for users to display their portfolio of stocks.
Now what do i include ?
Stock names, ticker, Buy/ Sell Price, Current Close price, Profit/loss accrued, status of the stocks ( hold, sold , watch)
I also give an option to set the trigger price whereby if the price exceeds, falls the level then a email or SMS notification is sent to the portfolio users.
Now the user wants to view the top 10 trades on the stock and its consolidated financial data like EPS etc on one click on the Stock Name / Ticker. This is considerable data and the servers that hosts the portfolio management web based system is neither exactly popular for its storage capablities nor performance in case of huge data retrievals......but admit it thats the only server host that you can afford in a 10000/- a year budget !
So what you do ? do you tell the user ....sorry you are very important to us but this cannot be done and risk pissing him off ?
Worse is if we try to employ the technologically infeasible option of giving it to him.
A brilliant techo guy would explore complex grids and web services that can do the job. But then asking the user to do more than clicking a button just to give him the data that he needs for a glance is asking him to do so much. Hey markets move very fast man !
A desginer would be inclined to think ...can i give him a hyperlink on the ticker to an URL that opens up a site like nseindia.com that would give him the top trades and fin data in one single page. If nseindia.com openly publishes data for you why not use it ???
May or may not work but we did try to satisfy the user's requirement but the way we want to do it.
thanks !
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