How do you work with Designers? | Hacker News Reader

How do you work with Designers?

4 pointscaptain_crabs4 comments

As a developer on a variety of small teams within small companies, I've never 'clicked' with a designer in a consistent way.

There are two buckets in my head. Visual designers simply want to make things look pretty, often with little regard to usability or implementation. UX designers take responsibility for understanding the users, and all the tradeoffs present in the entire interaction. UX designers answer "What?" Developers answer "How?" Visual designers answer "am I happy with how this looks?"

Likely pissed some of you off so please understand: don't intend to demean visual design. My frustration is spilling into the definition. In the projects I've worked on the designers produce work that looks pretty but isnt usable, or has no regard for implementation. Feel frustration at the emphasis put on the visual part because I feel like its coming at the detriment of putting out useful, intuitive software

Noticed the designers in each org slowly become someone that nobody else wants to work with, so they get silo'd off into their own projects and at some point cut out. Honestly a lot of the time I feel like I can't talk with them without deeply offending their ego, and so I'm left dedicating a lot of time and energy to communicating the "right" way with them. I feel like we should be discussing, we should be arguing, talking about stuff. But its silent, deadline comes, and I've gotta put something there so I do and thats what sticks. But there's no thought behind it, just me getting to functional.

Want to be able to lean on the designer to think the things I can't (even if it makes implementation considerably more difficult!). Looking for: explanation why, how they got there, and have some input along the way (ideally to judo down a complicated implementation to a simpler and still be good). On occasion collaboration will happen and usually these are the best parts of the projects.

Beneath it all, here's my real question: Is it me? What can I do better?

UX person here. I can do the spectrum of work from BRD and research through to wireframes and prototypes, but I stop before visual design.

You've enough detail in here that it's probably not entirely you, but rather your organization. The org has probably hired artists not designers and doesn't know how to make them properly accountable.

The simplest difference between an artist and a designer is who they work for. An artist works for themselves, a designer works for a business goal. An artist wants to be personally satisfied, a designer has metrics.

I've never met an artist I would trust to also do research or usability design, however, so wanting to push them be UX people instead of artists is probably not going to work.

However, you might be able to exert pressure by giving them design constraints.

A visual designer isn't designing a UI for themselves, they're designing a UI for the users of their application, so their business goals are things like user satisfaction, user comprehension, and user efficiency. Do the users like the look and feel (measured with things like desirability tests)? Do the users understand what they are looking at and finding what they need on each screen (measured with comprehension tests)? Do the users get their activities done as fast or ergonomic as possible (measured with usability tests)?

The last one you can directly influence on the engineering side. Chapter four of _The Humane Interface_ explains how to quantify usability. You can literally measure the usability of a UI and establish standards for performance, just like you establish standards for your code's performance. You can mathematically determine the minimum amount of input required to accomplish a task and measure the UI against that, with goals of improving the UI a certain amount over time. You could create test suites that measure a click path to see if a UI change improves or regresses it.

Putting these design constraints in place and then making the designers responsible for hitting them are a good way to see whether they're really designers, or just artists.

This is a great reply and strikes the heart of my question. Thank you! Just ordered that book.

haha. therapists will tell you to use "I feel" language. Seems like the similarity in communication here is "The users." This is a great way to leave no ambiguity for them to interpret as me commenting on their worth or identity as a person or professional, which I never am. Now that you've pointed this out, I can't believe I haven't been intentionally doing this forever.

It's a tough problem and it goes beyond visual design and has to do with the difference between a "group" and a "team".

In a group everybody thinks their responsibility starts and stops in a narrow scope and they get defensive when people push on them to rethink that and the last thing they want to do is slow down working on their little piece to help somebody else or get consensus on something.

In a team there is a sense that we are pulling together to attain a greater goal and people do what it takes even if it goes outside what they think their job description here.

Often teams are created by a real or artificial crisis. At one place I worked, I got gelled into a team right away because they put me on a project that was horribly behind schedule and that meant getting a huge amount of support from everybody in the office to get it ready. I worked at another place for about 4.5 years and it turned out the crisis that got me integrated into a team with (one of my overlapping) workgroups was also the one that got me (and my other workgroup) fired.

Military training of course works this way, and so do "team building" exercises.

Military books on human organizations are some of the most effective I've ever read. Any specific exercises that you lean on?

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