Bringing Design to Life

Bill Scott, the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, gave a presentation entitled “Bringing Design to Life – What Engineers Wish Designers Knew” at the WebVisions conference last week. Essentially, the presentation was about bridging the gap between designers and engineers and how to bring designs to life by prototyping. One of the main points that Scott makes is that designers and engineers are in many ways wired differently. Scott says that engineers are “implementation focused” and designers are “ideation focused” and wants designers and engineers to work more closely together and think from the other role’s point of view. Looking at Netflix interface, it seems that this approach has been really successful and I fully agree with his statements. However, this also goes for User Experience professionals. We also need to think more like designers and engineers to create projects that everybody enjoys working on.