by Karina Beattiger 5.March 2008 11:49
The first thing to do is explain what a Bingley is. For anyone who hasn't seen the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, you should. Hop to it. Shoo. Secondly, Mr. Bingley is one of the supporting characters who manages, through sheer deftness of cheer and hearty enthusiasm, to come off of every line as if he was going to add a rather excitable "WHOO!" at the end of it.
"There is nothing I love better than a tea-party... WHOO!"
"I do so enjoy a walk in the park... WHOO!"
"My dear sir, you happen to be standing on my foot... WHOO!"
That explained, a "Bingley" is the act of delivering the very unsaid cheer above: "WHOO!" (Nature Boy Ric Flair lovers may have a different concept of the word whoo, but we won't get into that now. We are not deserving of a side-chop to the chest...) We are giving a Bingley to the designers of the world who somehow manage to balance customer wants with customer needs, design aesthetic with customer wants, and functionality with design aesthetic. This links in, every so slightly, with Rusty's post about Designers vs. Developers, but because I am inherently biased -- I can be this way for just a little bit longer, see, before I, like WD Weems, start to sidle on over to straddle both (I hope) -- I am speaking from the point of view of designers.
Or rather (since I am well aware that I am not the only designer in the world and the universe only revolves around me when I am in the company of, say, my husband) from the point of view of myself.
Firstly, I want to mention that "Designers vs. Developers" is not a phrase I intend literally. Versus implies acrimony, which isn't the intent. It's just a fast way of saying "Which one of the following should I go see if I want a nice website: designers or developers?
With that out of the way, I launch into the point. With the caveat, do understand, that I speak from my own point of view, which is admittedly not as broad as some, but slightly broader than others. The point (finally) is this: Give a developer the basic understanding of what you want your site to do, and he will have it coded (sometimes inventing it along the way) to behave exactly as needed. Give a designer the basic understanding of what you want your site to look like, and she will spend the next three days doing it and redoing it because every proof she sends you is wrong.
This is because customers, by the very nature of the role, are difficult. I could get into a whole broad and over-generalizing sweep about how modern society has created a "give me the miracle I demand, but give it to me under my own terms and read my mind while you're at it" philosophy, and blah blah blah, but I won't. (Can we tell I've spent years in retail?) Some customers are beautiful, and so I can't generalize too much. The long and short of it is that most customers -- note emphasis on customers and most -- could care less what the underbelly of their website looks like. Whether you spend hours or days coding the site so that every store button generates reports that spit out on your printer with every "submit" and the checkout shoots out a census that ends up looking pretty in your email, the customer does not care. No one sees it. Grateful, maybe, thankful it's done and someone else did it, probably. No, what the customer cares about is how it looks. Is it pretty? Do the colors match? Is that picture exactly where I wanted it and why doesn't it look like the catalog I brought in with all the customed fonts I did on my son's computer? What does "websafe" mean and why can't that swirly font just be typed in?
The customer of course cares that the site does what it's supposed to do, but the bottom line revolves around marketing. If it doesn't look nice, no one will view it (unless the product in question rocks the socks off of sliced bread, and even then, pretty gains bonuses).
This is where the silent, subtle eternal war of aesthetics comes in. What is pretty to you won't be pretty to me. One man's taste is another man's mockery, and a layman may not understand the vagaries of the unspoken formula of "it works better this way". A customer with a very clear idea of what he wants may not realize that what he wants is a sub-standard, ineffective website with the kind of trim that should be shunted back over with the blink tag. There's all kinds of rules in regards to "pretty", but a designer has to make it work with "practicality". Sure, that ginormous bejewled elephant stampeding the unfortunate text at the sub content bar of your site is spiffy, but did you know that while we're staring at the rage-filled little eye, we're not reading your content? Too, your font is redonkerously ornate, but did you realize the only way to read it is to turn page styles off? Only that doesn't work, either, because your font doesn't exist in the general "pool" of web safe fonts, so that text is an image, which also means those of us with poor sight still can't read it if we bump the text size up in our browsers.
Of course, a lot of customers aren't quite so aggressive about this,a nd are willing to learn as you go, which is always such a pleasure to work with. After all, it's your product we're working with, we want you to love it! But there are some...
...Did you know that designers have to think like developers sometimes? "This looks great, but how would it have to be cut and coded? ...Not like that, obviously, let's move this around."
That bottom line is wrapping. It has to look pretty, and maybe that is society's general shallowness coming off. There's a reason why places like Victoria's Secret spend millions of dollars on hiring the Angels, you know: they make the wrapping look darn good. And if the wrapping looks good, then the product must be good! (Ah, don't we long for the days where what you see in a product is exactly what you get? When the color of the bottle or the prettiness of the ad or the color of the site just doesn't matter? ... No? Me, either...I'd be out of a job!)
Designers get the hard and often thankless task of taking a customer's needs, filtering out the wants and desires and setting them in a little jar by her desk, and then going through all of it to make a site that is: visually appealing, functionally useful, and -- the hardest part -- actually liked by the customer without sacrificing practicality.
And now that I've said all of that, I still have to give it up for the developers who must translate common English into the crunchy endoskeleton of a website while making compromises for aesthetics. Rusty is right. The two fields cross over so much, it's impossible to make the decision on whether to see a designer or a developer. You're best bet is to find a company or individual who does it all. If it's an individual, call them a desiveloper. Or a develigner. ...Both sound somehow evil, don't they?
Honestly, I strongly believe that it is a true paragon of humanity who can develop code of the laborious kind, design the site to wrap like a pretty skin around it, handle the customer to degrees of satisfaction all the way around, and still manage not to live in a padded room. Note I make no judgment on those who do actually manage to do designing and developing and have a great eye for both. I'd like to see your home someday. If they have visitng hours. ;)
Until that glorious human being (or other, I'm not picky) comes to work here, I am very, very glad that we have under one roof: designers that work directly with customers, designers that don't, developers that work with customers, developers that don't, designers that learn under the developers, and a lovely gentleman that acts as the smiling face of Mindfly in customer care.
... Have a Bingley.