2 page Case Study - Posted 7/3/2008

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Vertigo Software, Inc.

XAML-Based Tools Help Custom Development Shop Speed Delivery, Focus on User Experience

Vertigo wanted to avoid the barriers to designer-developer collaboration that it had faced in the past due to incompatible tools. The company met that goal by using Visual Studio® 2005 for software development with Microsoft® Expression® tools for UI design. Designers and developers were able to share projects, code, and UI designs throughout the application lifecycle, ultimately leading to faster delivery of a rich, interactive user experience.

Business Needs

Vertigo provides custom development services for a broad range of customers, many of which come to Vertigo for its balance of engineering and design expertise. The company employs some 30 developers and eight user-experience designers, who follow agile development principles and a Scrum methodology.

Having realized early on that writing code is only part of delivering on customer needs, Vertigo has always made user interface (UI) designers an integrated part of project teams. However, such an interdisciplinary approach posed challenges because the two disciplines used incompatible tools: Designers used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, whereas developers used the Microsoft® Visual Studio® development system.

“With Scrum, the idea is to have everyone working in parallel, with as few handoffs as possible,” says Tony Sokolowski, Design Director at Vertigo. “However, sometimes developers had to wait until designers had completed some part of the project, and vice versa. It also took extra time and effort to translate design deliverables into software development assets, which was repeated several times as we iterated on the UI. Besides, anytime you hand a UI design to a developer, you risk losing the initial vision.”

Vertigo faced those challenges to an even greater degree than usual in late 2006, when Microsoft asked the company to develop a reference application for Windows® Presentation Foundation. “We decided to build a genealogy application because it presented some unique challenges in areas such as user interaction and information visualization, for which Windows Presentation Foundation is especially well suited,” says Sokolowski. “We realized that properly taking advantage of those capabilities would require a highly iterative approach with a lot of rapid prototyping, and so we needed to avoid some of the barriers to designer-developer collaboration that we had faced in the past.”

Solution

Vertigo streamlined designer-developer collaboration while building its genealogy application—called Family.Show—by using Visual Studio Team System 2005 for software development together with Microsoft Expression® design software for UI design. Because both tools support XML Application Markup Language (XAML), the designer and developers for Family.Show were able to easily share projects, code, and UI designs throughout the application lifecycle, ultimately leading to faster delivery of a rich, interactive user experience.

Not only are we able to deliver faster today, but we’ve improved our ability to deliver the rich, interactive applications that clients want. Tony Sokolowski Design Director Vertigo Software

For Family.Show, the designer created the initial concepts in Adobe Illustrator. Vertigo then used Microsoft Expression Design to convert those Illustrator files to XAML assets, which were imported into Microsoft Expression Blend™ design software. “With Expression Blend, we were able to work on the XAML and C# code at the same time, using the tool to iterate on the UI without having to revert back to Adobe tools,” says Sokolowski. “It was during that stage that collaboration was most improved.”

The project was completed in three months by one full-time designer, two full-time developers, and one part-time developer, who used many Windows Presentation Foundation features to deliver the desired user experience. “Our designer took advantage of styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, and transforms to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree,” says Osburn. “That freed our developers to concentrate on underlying features such as a P/Invoke wrapper for Windows Vista® common dialogs and ClickOnce deployment. It’s a good example of what a small team of talented people can do with the right tools and technologies.”

Vertigo has since upgraded to Visual Studio Team System 2008, including Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite on developer desktops and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server for application lifecycle management.

Benefits

By adopting Expression design software, Vertigo was able to close the gap between development and design, leading to improved collaboration, faster project delivery, and an improved focus on interactivity. The benefits have been so strong that the company created a new role—that of “creative developer”—to take advantage of the new tools. “At least half our developers know how to use Expression Blend, which is used on about two-thirds of all of our projects, and our creative developers work in it almost exclusively,” says Sokolowski. “Not only are we able to deliver faster today, but we’ve improved our ability to deliver the rich, interactive applications that clients want.”

Advantages provided by the company’s new way of building software include:

• Increased productivity and faster delivery times. Because developers and designers use tools that speak the same language (XAML), they are able to work in parallel and can thus iterate on UI designs more rapidly, thereby accelerating delivery times. “A small team built Family.Show in three and a half months,” says Sokolowski. “Had we tried to do it the old way, it would have taken much longer or required more people. By decreasing the time to iterate on UI changes from three or four days down to one, Expression tools helped us cut in half the time we needed to deliver the application.”
  
  
• Earlier focus on interactivity. Project teams can get to a working prototype much faster, leading to an increased focus on interactivity. “In the past, when we reached the first development milestone and had something to show, it was often too late for big changes,” says Osburn. “Today, we can deliver a prototype just a few weeks into a project, which enables us to focus more on the user experience and results in less drift from the designer’s initial vision. Face-to-face collaboration between developers and designers—and rework of the UI—is still required, but now we have the tools to streamline the process.”