#proto-content

The ninth week of my internship was very plain and was spent finishing up the projects and making the final presentation video. I was also busy learning some front end coding and development for my next project where I will be coding a small game.  One thing that I have started to realize is that having a good relationship with the dev team helps a lot as a designer as they usually have very useful input on accessibility and colors and secondly, learning how to code not only helped me appreciate what the dev team does but also gave an insight into how to design. 

I will be talking a little about what we discussed this week in our weekly team meeting i.e. Content first approach in Design and Development. We discussed that the primary job of a website is to deliver good content and the design should be done based around it. As content development takes some time, we discussed on how we can have a proto-content that can be used to design as early as possible. This approach not only gives a start to the design team but also helps the content team to see where they have to change the content and/or make new content. There is no issue with using lorem ipsum; it is just that one can never gauge the text size or how the content will affect the design by it. In short, we do not need perfect content in our imperfect prototype, just something that resembles the real thing and not some gibberish that then will affect the whole design and flow. Not only the design gets affected but the dev team also has to change the whole structure of the code because of the new design changes. We discussed how I had made proto-content for a project called Sleep Diary so that I can start designing it as the content team could not start working on it immediately. The recommendations I made then helped the content team to narrow down the scope and come up with the content very fast. The content change did not affect my design or the dev team’s work.