Adobe’s Engagement Platform

is it really a match made in heaven?

Recently, Adobe announced it’s new "engagement platform," which it’s hoping will help it keep an edge on Microsoft. One of the biggest benefits of this new platform is a single universal client that can render PDF, Flash, and HTML - yup, a single client to read them all. That’s pretty cool and sounds promising. But…

There’s a quote from the announcement that concerns me:

"The new advantage to these tools from Adobe is that a developer can wear many hats," said Shari Nakano, an intranet developer and author of the recently printed book, "Adobe Creative Suite 2 Workflow." "Adobe and Macromedia are a good blend because more and more people are diverse in these types of technologies."

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Adobe is wooing more developers with its new Adobe Labs test site. Earlier this month, Adobe released an update to the Flash Professional 8 authoring tool aimed at mobile developers building applications for Flash Lite 2 software at the Adobe Labs Web site. Beta versions of Adobe’s Flex product line and Flash Player 8.5 have also been posted.

Adobe seems very focused on developers. There’s no mention of designers in the entire release. None. Zero. Zilch. Obviously, as a person who focuses on design (information design, interaction design) and usability, this really concerns me. I’m no more in favor of developers designing RIA interfaces’s than developers are of having designers doing server-side development.

Developers are better at figuring out the technical design. Designers are better at figuring out the interaction and behavior. Yes, there’s often some level of overlap, but throwing interaction design to the developers is going to set us back a decade in usability. I hope this is a simple an over site in the release and Adobe isn’t just assuming that this will just work itself out.

Focusing on the developer community did work well for Macromedia. The Macromedia Exchange is a great community for sharing and finding extensions for most of their products. I believe this went a long way in improving the penetration of their suite of tools. And this did help bridge the gap, enabling designers to move somewhat into the development space, or at least put together pr of-of-concept pieces without having to wait on development resources. However, many of the extensions are poorly designed from a UI perspective. They "function," but don’t suffer from sub-optimal behavior or UI design. Fortunately, the Flash environment allows for editing the UI and behaviors. So, you can use the extensions as a starting point and improve it. That’s good.

Sharing is also good. Perhaps we’ll see a nice mash-up of development communities for this new Adobe Engagemen Platform and other open-source pattern libraries. If we can do that, then maybe we’ll get to the point where developers are able to leverage well designed UI patterns and designers are able to leverage well developed extensions and environments. This could provide better integration between the two worlds and ultimately better products and services with improved usability.