Over the last year I’ve visited over 25 interactive agencies, small and large software development firms, and personally contributed designs to 8 different software design/develop projects. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, I’ve noticed that most projects whose goal is the creation of a rich interactive experience follow a consistent set of high-level workflow phases (which I won’t enumerate in this post, but come see me talk at FITC to learn more). At a certain point along these phases there develops a gap between the tasks of designers and those of developers. The fact is, most designers don’t code, and most developers don’t design.

As a result, organizations develop processes to help designers and developers jump over this gap. In some cases, designers lob their design specifications over the gap hoping that the developers catch them, read them, and follow them to the line. This rarely works. Developers don’t want to read some 100 page treatise on the interaction design of a button!

In other cases, especially at small agencies, the gap is bridged by moving both sides of the chasm closer together. Designers and developers work in close physical proximity to each other, listen to the same music, come from the same cool culture, which helps them both see eye to eye and have the same goals in terms of the end product and the path towards getting there. This cultural meshing, along with the fact that the client often chooses a firm because of it’s culture, is one of the reasons interactive agencies produce more innovative and interesting interactive experiences than large software firms, in shorter periods of time.

But even in small, powerful interactive agencies, designers and the developers are required to engage in each other’s tasks in order to get the job done. For example, the developer may be required to refactor a design to get it play nicely with the code structure. Or the designer must jump into Flex Builder to ensure the fidelity of their skinned comboboxes. This cross-product, cross-task engagement requires designers and developers to cross the gap, sacrificing comfort and efficiency to ensure the quality of the end product. After all, designers don’t want to muck around with stuff in Flex Builder, and developers most definitely do not want to spend the majority of their time skinning components.

The solution ultimately is to mind the gap. Tools need to make it easier for designers to better prototype and communicate experiences, and for developers to take these experiences and make them real, quickly, and without the need to recode.

In other words, designers should never be forced to do jobs of developers, and vice versa.