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Rob Adams
Table of Contents
Designing for Flex – Part 2: Planning your application
Before diving into the specific details of designing for Flex, let’s take a moment to discuss how to plan a Flex application. The planning process for designing a Flex RIA is similar to that required for any large-scale application project, but there are a few new activities and some old ones that deserve special attention due to their particular importance in Flex RIA planning. If you are already familiar with such activities, you might skip this article and proceed to Designing for Flex – Part 3: Structuring your application .
This article covers:
- The five data points any Flex application designer or developer should know: the target market, the target users, their goals, their content, and their tasks.
- How to prepare for designing and visualizing your users’ content.
- How to prepare for designing your application around users’ tasks and workflows.
Note that this article refers to several activities that appear in some overarching design or development processes. Flex does not require or prefer any particular process; you can be equally successful designing a Flex application with a process emphasizing up-front design activities (such as Goal-Directed Design or Contextual Design) as you can with a more iterative process that blends design and development (such as Scrum or other Agile methods). You can incorporate these activities into any process, or even follow them if you have no formal process at all.
The Designing for Flex series includes the following articles:
- Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex
- Part 2: Planning your application
- Part 3: Structuring your application
- Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop
- Part 5: Designing content displays
- Part 6: Guiding with motion
- Part 7: Making your application fast
- Part 8: Making your application safe
- Appendix A: List of best practices
- Appendix B: For further reading
I suggest that you read Part 1 before proceeding.
Download all parts of the FIG series as PDF files that you can print and read offline: adobe_flex_interface_guide.zip (ZIP, 5.7MB)
This content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
About the author
Rob Adams works for Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He started at Macromedia, Inc. in 2004 and has worked on the Flash authoring tool, Flash Player, and Fireworks, but nowadays works primarily on the Flex product line. He is involved with the design of the core framework itself as well as the designer/developer tools such as Flex Builder and Creative Suite. Although his primary focus is on design research, he also does some design work, promotes sound design practices both within Adobe and without, and makes himself a general pain in the necks of the designers, product managers, and engineers he works with.
