In order to staff a Silverlight project its generally a good idea to fill three roles:

  1. UX
  2. Creative
  3. Technical

UX is typically a front loaded activity that operates primarily during analyze and design and whose deliverables input into build.

Creative gets brought in during design. Creative has two basic roles: Visual Designer and Interaction Implementer. A Visual Designer will be heavily utilized during the design phase and will live in tools like Adobe Illustrator or Expression Design to construct visual assets. A Visual Implementer will be most heavily utilized during the build phase where they will work side-by-side with the technical team to integrate the visual assets into the solution. Ineraction Implementers will live in Expression Blend.

Technical is of course utilized the heaviest during build but, as usual you should bring your Technical Architect on during Plan & Analyze to help steer Functional, UX, and Creative towards feasible solutions. Developers will live in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

Depending on the skill sets of your team you may have some cross over personalities along the Implementer/Developer boundary. As developers get more and more savvy in the ways of Expression Blend, I think we could see this role as a secondary or tertiary skill set for many developers.

Generally, its a good idea to bring on UX & Creative resources if you are trying to achieve some higher order levels of user experience but it is not required and I would say in your case specifically it would be a “nice to have”.

Silverlight is a highly viable development platform for building standard line of business applications. Silverlight is not just about flashy graphics. Its about building web applications that have all the features modern users have grown to expect with faster time to market and lowered maintenance costs. Oh, and if you want to add some piz-azz with all the spare time you have…you can do that to. :-)