Should developers design? Should designers develop?

 

(image credit: thenextweb.com)

 

I’ve worked as both a designer and a developer and as both at once. From this, I’ve learned that while each role requires specialisation, there is a strong overlap. I found this overlap to be particularly strong in the fields of user experience design (UXD), user interface design (UID) and front-end development (FED). While it is certainly necessary, and near impossible, to have equal skills across all of these disciplines, it is vital to have an understanding of they relate and connect.

On a practical level, it aids productivity to have a FED that can do image editing, identify a font or imply colour theory. It’s important to have a UID that understands usability principles. It’s valuable to have a UXD that has a grasp of visual theory when wire-framing. All of these overlaps in knowledge are useful for teams from a delivery perspective but the true power is in each disciplines understanding each other’s role in the broader context of the user. The benefits of this collaborative understanding has been a key differentiator, in my experience, between a design team that can or cannot work together effectively.

So, should developers actually design? I recently listened to an episode of User Defenders, on this very question, entitled Should Developers Design with Laura Elizabeth. Laura runs a platform called Design Academy, that aims to equip developers with useful skills and thinking to better enable them as FEDs. She teaches them to ‘debug design’, as one would debug code, when looking for an error in a system. Laura trains developers to use basic design principles to figure out a design problem logically. Laura states on her site, that “[w]ith Design Academy, I’m working really hard to provide a systematic approach to design that you can follow to achieve a solid, user-friendly design every time.” This ‘knowledge share’ aids in avoiding the sometimes painful exchanges between developers and designers. I’ve seen many a ruffled feather, when teams try and decide on the ‘right solution’ or why a specific implementation is or isn’t a good idea.

Now onto the next question, which has been in debate in design circles for sometime now, ‘should designers develop’? I first took the leap into development back in 2015 and it has paid off exponentially. This knowledge and experience has allowed me to better design solutions that are logical, robust and scalable. Being able to develop, has also allowed me to have conversations about technology and design with developers, that would otherwise have been closed off to me. I’ve seen many of my friends in the field of UXD and UID follow suit and explore the world of code. This exploration has become vital, to better understand the many complex technologies that we are designing for.

Prototyping tools have picked up on this trend and now allowing for code editing, such as in the example below from Framer. Using a tool such as this, a designer can create a prototype very similar to the product intended to be developed. The benefits of this is clear as it ensures that when a design reaches the dev team, it has been through testing that emulates and validates the final product.

 

An example showing code on the left and a usable prototype on the right

(image credit: prototypingwithframer.com) 

 

We all have our strengths and weaknesses and should not feel a need to be a ‘unicorn’ but we should certainly be able to speak each other’s language. By better understanding the roles of those within our design team, as well as learning from and teaching each other, we are able to create better products that serve our user.

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