Designers should use a Wiki

So the other day my friend posted a twitter about designing on wikis or maybe it was a status message on aim... anyway, he posted something and it started a long conversation about the importance of using Wikis to explain designs to developers.

This reminded me of this idea I had about a paper for CHI, which I have since abandoned. But the idea was that designers need to design not only for our users but also for developers. That doesn't mean doing what developers want but instead communicating in a way that makes sense and is clear to developers. Wikis are helpful in that way because they allow designers to put things up in any format that they like (story board, mocks etc) and with the help of many bug tracking systems you can link designs to bugs which then let developers have a clean spec to work off of. This is something that we've been talking about supporting in Bugzilla, plus Jira and Confluence already do it.

I've talked about using wikis at CHI before during some BOF sessions, and I assumed this was common knowledge a quick google search resulted in:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2005/01/20/wikidocs.html

So it seems like some people know about this, but if you're a designer and you don't know about this then I say, USE A WIKI!. They're great in all forms. Perhaps I'll start blogging more about how we use wikis in our group later on so that i dont have to write about it every time someone asks. Makes sense hu?

Well I'm back to doing praca v2 dev work. Also that conversation with a buddy of mine about animation and why it is important. I'll hopefully get a hold of that paper and power point presentation that we discussed. But the short of it is, animation is great from designers point of view and if you have an animation layer, it is usually easy to implement and makes applications feel much smoother, the problem is... getting managers and developers to understand that... but that's another blog posting all together.