Designing for Flex – Part 2: Planning your application

Planning for content

"Content" is a general term for the nouns of your Flex application. Content is at the center of your application’s value proposition; it is the work your users do, the products they buy, the media they watch or listen to, the messages they send to their friends. All user goals that involve using computer technology involve content, for computers are information machines and content is information in the broadest sense of the word.

Figure 4. An application’s content can take many forms. The examples above are only a tiny sample; any information humans create or consume could conceivably be content for a Flex application. Ensure that you understand the content your application will work with before you start designing.

Flex and Flash provide powerful tools for visualizing and manipulating content. The core Flash Player graphics, sound, and video capabilities enable rich rendering of multiple media types. The Flex framework provides means of making this media dynamic by streaming it over the network and allows users to interact with it in novel ways. These tools enable you to bring content to the forefront of your application. Great Flex applications allow users to work directly with their content instead of forcing them to hunt through layers of application widgets and other chrome to locate it.

To effectively design an application around its content you must have a solid understanding of what users do with that content. A good first step is to examine the tools and artifacts your target users use today. From this, make a list of the content users will work with in your application and describe its properties. For example, if you are designing a music player, your list may include songs, artists, albums, and playlists. This exercise is similar to data modeling in software development, except that instead of defining the technical structure of data for mapping onto the tables of a relational database, you are describing your content in the ways users will think about it while using your application.

Once you have defined the types of content your application will support, obtain real samples of this content to use during the design process. Real sample content is an essential ingredient for design processes that produce content-focused applications. Without it, the design process will give excess attention to user interface widgets, leading to designs full of buttons, sliders, and other application chrome that prevent users from working efficiently with what they really care about—their content.

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