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Comment by huuu | Hacker News Reader

Since CSS2/3 I never touched design programs again to design websites and web apps. It's so easy to trow a basic interface together and then use CSS to give it nice looks. So this became my way of work:

  * Build a simple HTML template as interaction design
  * Add some basic design (style, color, fonts)
  * With the customer fine tune the design
  * Add code to the templates to make it all work (or hand it over to development)

Ofcourse you still need design experience. You are just using other tools.

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I agree it is easy to throw a basic interface together in HTML/CSS/JS, oftentimes the code is reusable and this approach can be pretty effective. However, I'll present a reason you should NOT do that - if you are working with non-technical users /designers in a joint-application-design (JAD) or collaborative type session.

When you are sitting next to someone, and you are designing UI, and you have to open anything that looks like code, it can throw off non-technical people severely. Oh, sure I can make this box bigger, let me just change this property on some CSS, adjust this div and then refresh the screen?

I have done both styles, using tools like Balsamiq and Axure RP, paper prototypes, whiteboard prototypes, fat-client prototypes using desktop UI frameworks, and prototypes in HTML/CSS/JS. I think the advice here is, make sure you know the audience you're working with, and that having to interleave code with the design process doesn't throw off the workflow (even if only basic coding).

I used to sit down with a client and change elements of the design right from the developer tools. In theory, it's a nice approach.

In practice, it meant that clients started to have unrealistic expectations of 1) how many changes they could ask me to make over time, and 2) how much time it would take to make a change.

So nowadays I only do this with designers that I work with, at set times, or with clients that I know I can trust.

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