Expert: vijayan - 10/18/2011

Question
QUESTION: Dear Vijayan

We observe that there are experts in Web Designing Software viz. Adobe Photo shop, Flash, Action scripting,  Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Paintshop Pro,Corel Draw, Page maker, Cascading Stylesheet(css) etc

We observe that there are experts in Web Development/Programming  Software viz. HTML,DHTML, XML, Java, PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, CGI Scripting, C#, Ajax, WPF, WCF, Javascript, Sql, Pl/Sql etc

But we find very few experts who know both Web Designing as well as Web Programming i.e Design as well as code/program Web Sites.

What could be the reasons attributing to this ?

i.e Interest, Creativity,  Logic, Analytical etc ?

Thanks & Regards,
Prashant S Akerkar

ANSWER: The skills required are quite different. As are their world views.

Programmers are technical people; a user interface designed by a programmer would probably be a good user interface for other programmers, people who understand the technology. Programmers treat the solution domain as the primary domain; ergonomics puts users at the center of the design process to give them a maximum level of comfort.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Dear Vijayan

Thank you.

Do you attribute the reasons for the skills/competencies to Right Brain v/s Left Brain Myth ?

Web Designing = Creative -> Right Brain ?
Web Development = Logical, Analytical -> Left Brain ?

http://www.rense.com/general2/rb.htm

Thanks & Regards,
Prashant S Akerkar

Answer
No, I do not.

Between the two, I think that great programming is the more creative activity.

I think the difference lies in difference between the programmer's perception of the user and the ui designer's perception of the user.

To give an analogy, is the user interface design of vi a good design? It depends. [b]vi[/b] has an interface that is hideously unfriendly to new users, but it is still in wide use today because it has such a superb interface people who know how to use it. The vi interface was designed by a programmer for use by programmers; it should never be considered by someone who just wants to make a few changes to a text file once in a while.