MYTH: Design is a luxury.
REALITY: In his 1990 book, The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman offers the traditional antidote for all those who underestimate the role of design in our lives. The issue is not whether design should happen -- it always happens. Everyone in product development does design work, whether they know it or not. Moreover, the design is the dimension of a product that customers see and feel; it is what satisfies or disappoints them.
In software development, design is widely misunderstood and undervalued. Often no explicit user interface design is done separately from the code. Iterative design then becomes recoding. This is a short-sighted strategy because it results in significantly more code being written in the long run. Because design is unavoidable, the real issue is whether it is left implicit in the software being developed, or made explicit and captured separately. The useful debate is about how to do design work well, and how to capture it in an optimal form for communicating to those who implement it.
An explicit user interface design can focus on how a product satisfies customer wants and needs rather than on how to build it. This can make implementation more difficult, but that is the price to be paid for focusing on the real goal of product development. An explicit design allows for early detection of implementation issues, as well as for placing the primary focus on satisfying users. Simultaneous design and implementation sometimes occurs on small projects. However, this approach is not scalable and requires some very special, multitalented people. Software development superheroes are in short supply.
