When you have to plan a Rich Internet Application from the start it’s quite easy, i mean that you have the freedom to follow the right workflow in order to guarantee your clients the best results. You can think about target, markets, you can plan the navigation and design the interface taking care of every important rules, but what happen when you find yourself in front an already made application and someone ask you to do the restyling?
Most of the time talking with clients it’s not so simple to make them understand that a very important part of an application is usability, that is not only a matter of “this or that color, this or that icon”, so in those cases we must work hard doing our best to get a good compromise between “the best and the worst”.
When we look to an application that we haven’t planned, the first thing is to see how the navigation works and what this application is supposed to do, how it is the interaction with the end users, if it’s handy or complicated to follow, then we can start to find some solutions to fix the problems about usability and, at the same time, we should give some advices about the look and feel of the entire application.
If there is enough time before the final deploy we can create graphical skins for components using Adobe Illustrator, Flash or Fireworks or we can change styles of component using CSS approach in Flex. This is the best choice if there is no time to create graphics and there are even good links to help us when we are in a hurry:)
The CSS style explorer of Adobe Flex is a big help when you want to be fast, it shows in real time how the style of a component can change and, after you have defined your own style, it is possible to copy and paste the code in your application
The same thing happen with the Components explorer, here we can see how most of the standard components we use in our RIAs are made
The difficult thing being a user interface designer or a designer in general, is to make people understand that our job is made of different parts, that we take care of some practical aspects not only of “esthetic”. We design, but first of all we follow a process which includes theory before practice.