Jul
7
Designing for the Future
Filed Under alpha, design | Leave a Comment
Designing a web application takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of patience. Two of those three are qualities I find myself lacking (care to make a guess?). But that’s not to say that the product will be lacking. In it’s present state, Event Seek meets all the standards we’ve set for our alpha product. Things are organized in an orderly fashion and everything connects in a more-or-less seamless and usable way. But while the present offering meets our expectations and functions properly in *most* (crappy windows browsers coming soon!) browsers, could it be so much better? Absolutely.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. I think most startups can agree. On most nights and, yes, sometimes weekends, Tristan, Connor and I are all feverishly pouring over the product, the feedback, and the blueprint for beta. While beta is a long time off, the considerations for it are here and now. What more, we’ve got to plan further than that. We need to anticipate. I think one of the hardest parts about delivering a product as exciting as Event Seek is delegating good ideas for the future. Aside from all of our great ideas for features, we have to focus on our primary objective: we have to deliver a product that is functional, adaptable, and modular.
With so much of the future features being put off, one would think that the design of the product could very well be decided before a single line of Event Seek code has been written. Well, as things turn out, that assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. For example, we reorganized the messaging system in a mere 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago. What does that mean for the front-end designer of Event Seek? You have to be on your toes. Your style sheets will need to constantly adapt and your markup should be robust enough (and semantic enough!) to handle the strain.
With that in mind, I am constantly looking at ways of setting down practices: a sort-of design document if you will. But Event Seek is still evolving rapidly. We want to be a comprehensive event solution. That word, comprehensive, and the front-end engineer’s battle –namely, to be concise– are diametrically opposed. Take for example a very likely situation: you’re a partner of ours and you want Event Seek powering your event offering. You will probably want something that looks and feels like your existing site. Further still, you may want a “widget” or some other kind functionality that works outside of the existing application. How does one style these widgets? Do you want a partner having to link to your stylesheets? Do you want to conjure up unique stylesheets for each client? These are questions I have to ask myself on a day-to-day basis.
So, if you are a front-end developer and you organize your stylesheets like I do, you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds most of your “static” designs: elements on the page that don’t really change depending on the ID of the page or the nature of the session. Then you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds the “modular” parts of your design: elements that come and go in a fluid fashion, and elements that need to adapt to the layout they are placed in. The problem comes when you need to have both the “static” parts of your site, and the “modular” parts of your site changing at the same time. No two clients will ever want the same design, so you need to design for the future.
In making the trasition from a completely web-standards design to one that is fueled in part by IE hacks, this is a serious point of contention for me. Designing your site to be robust enough for the future but stable enough to be cohesive and have a sense of brand unity is a very perplexing problem. It’s one of those unique challenges that makes my job more fun. In addition to our own discussions about the subject, we’ve got a great user base that has given us fantastic insight and feedback about the product. We couldn’t ask for more. Well, maybe except having that user base discuss their ideas on the forum. Everyone here at Digital Lodestone Group is proud of Event Seek alpha. We all have a part in evolving the product, anticipating our customers’ requests and exceeding everyone’s expectations.