I’ll get the plug part of this post out of the way right here: I worked on a preview of Bill Scott’s upcoming webinar on What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering and I think it’s both very good and very important, and what’s more it’s a topic that I’ve never seen addressed outside project work.

I was reminded of this in a meeting the other day. We’re working through a Flex application that asynchronously queries the server with each criteria specified on a form, a little like what Kayak does, but with more data coming back from the server. Unfortunately the latency in that data transfer is simply too high, with too much customer time spent watching the spinning cursor. It’s unfortunate, because the design of the form itself (not mine) is clever, and I found myself thinking, “This is how Google would do it.” But the infrastructure in question is not as robust as Google’s infrastructure, and so the design needs to be modified to fit the latency of the system.

And this is the kind of situation that Bill refers to. When designers understand the limits and degree of difficulty in the technology needed to implement their designs, the designs are better.