By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
While the left-brain right-brain model is under fire within the scientific community, I think it still remains an apt metaphor for Internet development. In short, in order to provide a good user experience on the web, there needs to be a collaborative approach which weds the creative and analytical aspects of the mind.
How many times have you encountered a website, beautifully designed but inert, difficult to navigate, and wholly impractical? Conversely, how many times have you found a shoddy-looking interface on top of useful online application rendering it virtually useless?
This goes to the very heart of web development-how companies are organized, how the process of building sites takes place, even which kind of companies produce the best Internet experiences. It is clear to me that both design and development are creative acts, and are inextricably linked.
The best companies that yield the best results understand this, and organize themselves accordingly. A design/advertising/PR company that attempts to move into the Internet space often fails because of its inability to understand software development philosophy and processes ... indeed, its inability to understand the software developer. Software and technical companies make the same mistake when approaching website development, when they see design and interface work as an after-thought, not understanding the vitally graphic nature of the web.
One might imagine that hiring one company to do the design and another to do the development might solve this problem, but they would be wrong. The two aspects are too closely interrelated and require day-to-day, even moment-to-moment collaboration between all of the moving parts. It is virtually impossible to create a great site by cobbling an interface together after the development has taken place.
So the right solution ... the best organization, is the one where developers and designers sit together as part of a unified process, and team project management (not unlike the corpus callosum in the human brain) links together and otherwise schizophrenic divergence of talent and creativity.
If this is wrong, and upon me prov'd, then I never writ, nor no man ever developed for the web.
