For many years, designers were marginalized by engineering teams during the software development lifecycle. In some cases, designers delivered prototypes that developers tried to match using their own tools. For other situations, designers came at the end of the process to skin the product and “make it look good”.
However, design is an integral part of the development process and designers often bring a unique set of creative skills to the development lifecycle that should never be underestimated.
Microsoft Expression Blend is a User Interface authoring tool to enable designers to become part of the development process. Blend leverages the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight by allowing designers to work on the XAML code (User Interface Markup language) separately from developers working on the back-end. Blend’s promise is “the end of throw away prototypes”. Whether designers are defining the interaction paradigms of an application or creating the skin of buttons and containers, their work becomes part of the final product.
My role:
I worked with the Expression Blend team as a user experience program manager where I played a key role in the user interface redesign effort, taking the product from its incubation state to a usable, task centered, user focused design.
By redefining workflows, understanding user profiles, creating use cases and scenarios and performing task analysis, the interface transformed the product from being a technology centric, feature heavy toolinto a design centric, user friendly and efficient environment.
Expression Blend is one of the projects I am most proud to be part of. Today, I use it every day to create interactive prototypes and tools for my commercial and personal projects.
Microsoft Expression BLend
