Quick Blog: Architecting your applications - Avoid "All Tinsel with No Tree" pitfalls

I recently met with a client of mine. He is a professor, and needs a grading/rollbook application, and this app will be for his eyes only. Being the web/database guru that I am, I recommended that we create a web application.. for the obvious benefits that the web provides us.

After some initial conversation... and some notes written on scraps of paper during a Chinese buffet lunch meeting... I was able to get to work. I began with a simple HTML mock-up. Nothing fancy, nothing dynamic, just a quick and dirty way to show the principles of how the system will perform. For example, I created a screen mockup of adding a student to the system, a separate screen on assigning grades to a student, etc. Nothing of a rocket scientry proportion...

After a few hours of work, we met again to discuss the status of the system: how it will work, what we need to do next, etc. I explained to him that the screens are very basic, but to focus on the functionality... not the design. What he said next was just... perfect... so perfect that I wanted to blog about it. He said "that's fine, I don't want to be given all tinsel with no tree". I immediately thought... perfect, I'm on track for writing this system. Fortunately, he felt the same.

The moral of the story is this. If you develop app's the way I do, you're in charge of some database design, some application development, and some web design as well.. just to name a few of the skills we must always sharpen! Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in how a system looks.. on mock drafts.. just avoid that. More importantly, have your clients avoid it on round 1 design sessions as well. The longer you think of system functionality, the better the application design is.. and the happier the client is.

I am not telling you to avoid making your app pretty, but pretty can come at a later time. Slap a CSS sheet while creating your mockups, and in a matter of an hour or two you can update the look and feel. System functionality is... obviously... a different animal, but worth the time to give it's full attention at the start of your project.