2011: The year design trumps tech

Themes are essentially "plug and play" skins for WordPress sites, allowing a user to change the style and design of their site on the fly, at the click of a button. It has generally cut down, or cut out, the need for development.

Pienaar builds these themes for a living, so would naturally ask these questions. But it's becoming easier to agree with his sentiments that design skills are in fact trumping those of development and technology.

Here's why:

Often the solution is not technically demanding

When a new "to-do" list app comes to prominence in the iPhone App Market it is not because of breakthroughs in technology. The same is true of games that have gained ridiculous amounts of users, such as Angry Birds, Paper Toss and Farmville. What drives the massive adoption of these applications and games is their creative execution, and their careful focus on usability and user experience.

User experience thinking teaches us that the average end user doesn't care at all about the tech involved in an application they are using - they perceive the interface, and everything else is just 'magic'. If it does the job quickly, easily and efficiently in comparison to the competitors, then it's a winner.

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