From Design to Front-end | Hacker News Reader

From Design to Front-end

imaginarycloud.com

45 pointssandrobfc25 comments

Might be an unpopular opinion but it's 2018 and you can easily find front-end developers with enough design sensibility and UX common sense to not need designers at all for building an app. I've been doing this for 10 years, in different companies, with different people, and I've seen many front-end developers being very successful at designing apps on their own.

I personally enjoy it too. I usually draw wireframes on a piece of paper and iterate, if necessary, with the product team and/or the users. Then I directly implement the wireframes in React or whatever technology the company uses. Some developers like to use Photoshop or Sketch, but from my experience, a digital mockup doesn't add much value over a drawn wireframe so I just skip these tools.

PS: Building a company's website is different than building a company's app. Your CEO/marketing team will want logos & branding colors (reusable by the sales & marketing teams for their presentations), illustrations, videos, animated menus, complex layouts, fancy gradients, parallax scrollings (ew!) and so on. A designer will probably be better at this job (and more interested in) than a developer.

Yeah, I'd have to agree, although I think it shouldn't be that way...but it is: every designer I've ever worked with has some weird pathological predilection to be borderline abusive to users in the quest to make the app/site they are designing their personal art gallery... and Frontend devs are left meekly trying to stand up for the user. I don't know why this pathology surfaces in so many places, but talking with colleagues, it's pretty common everywhere.

It's because designers are just clueless and don't know how things are implemented. The opposite is also true: the parent is practically an alien here for liking design yet he doesn't even see the point in a photoshop over a wireframe.

I think in general people are too specialized. You probably want designers that do a little development and developpers that do a little design. The full on generalist approach is also poor, I've done both jobs in my life and ended up mediocre at both.

The difficulty is of course that, ultimately, design sensibility is subjective. However, my experience working with folks that have actually studied design or otherwise specialized in user experience have a marked improvement (as measured with A/B testing) over the designs that are developed by "easy to find front-end developers with design sensibility." YMMV.

It's nice to hear of developers that enjoy design, even greater to find ones that are legitimately good at it, but frequently dealing w/ engineers that fancy themselves good at design can be... difficult. And, I'm not a designer.

There is a lot of designers that are not that good at design either... Some are just temps, interns, wrongly hired or have switched roles in the company.

And when you target (web) applications, a developer might even have more experience with the UX as a user and designer!

Each case depends on the qualities of the people involved.

Most developers “doing design” don’t only miss some basic skills, like proper need analysis, but plain don’t have the time to deeply analyze the problem. I know the “try it and see if it sticks” methods is popular right now, but monkeys won’t write Shakespeare by chance. I’m not telling that front end developers are not talented at what they do, they do know something very valuable. Their skill is to be able to understand designs as well as designer intents, and get them implemented right.

Now for some side project, of course good front end developers are better than no designer at all. Are they able to design for scale and high revenue? Only when they become full time designers.

Any design done by anyone should get the same benefit of testing and iteration, regardless of whether it was a 'designer' or a 'design agency' or a 'developer'.

Biggest issue I run in to (from dev/tech perspective) when working with any 'design' person is that, in pretty much every experience I've ever had (done this for 20+ years in the web world), the person/team doing the design work has one of two issues:

1. they've never done web work

2. they don't provide enough state information

You put 3 toggle buttons and a sample piece of information in a mockup... but don't 'design' out what should happen when mutually exclusive things happen... FML. Because regardless of what choices I make to fill in the blanks (and there are always blanks), they're inevitably "wrong" from someone's view (the original design person, or someone on the client's team, etc) because they're now being presented with a decision to make that they didn't have to think about before.

It may come across as subtlety "passive aggressive", depending on how you word it, but... damn it - when you put a dozen widgets on the screen and indicate they're linked together - you need to actually think about every single possible state (and step flow, etc).

The more 'application-oriented' something is, the less useful I've found "designer" input to be, outside of giving basic font/color/styling guidelines.

It's worse when the people label themselves "UX", but still don't provide any of the state info.

if ultimately design sensibility is subjective then ultimately code quality is subjective as well.

it is, but what's that got to do with the price of potatoes?

> you can easily find front-end developers with enough design sensibility

As one of those, I'd say that "easily" is a bit strong. Most front-end developers that I have met that claim they could do design outputted bad work.

I'm talking not even following the basic web design rules and commandments of typography.

Things like not properly aligning stuff, not being able to come up with a constant color scheme, having no clue what vertical rhythm is, etc.

Maybe your country is different, but I've only met one, and he initially studied graphic design. The other day at work I overheard a dev talking about his personal website, saying "people expect it to look good -- they don't understand that I'm a developer, not a designer." So I don't think we're quite there yet.

It’s also incredibly easy to find a tenplate or copy common styles etc. At my last company a designer spent ~2 weeks coming up with what amounted to a standard side navbar.... I think designers need to be focusing on clever UI that gives users an intuitive/simple experience rather than what color our buttons should be.

While the central topic still makes sense, a lot of the technical prescriptions in there are pretty well outdated and even contradict best practices today. I'd be curious to know just how long ago this was written.

Edit: March 2016, and their dateline has since been removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20160311072848/https://www.imagi...

It was a little bit dated in 2016 too to be honest.

No question.

Hate to be that guy, but it seems crazy that a design-related site would do such horrible things to scrolling on iPhone to the extent that I switched to reader view!

Been a long time since I've seen double scrollbars on anything not in active dev... that must play hell with a mobile web view.

Looks like the issue also appears on Firefox, but doesn't on Chrome.

I think this might be because there's a CSS scrollY property set on a parent element and needs: overflow-y: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

set on the content to re-enable momentum scrolling.

Regarding designers and developers:

http://designinginterfaces.com/2011/06/01/designers-that-cod...

Shameless plug :)

I design sites and web apps using bootstrap and within the browser vs. some wire-framing tool.

Surprisingly enough my front-end design coding has led me to lose out on design jobs.

Is it really best practice to finish your html first and only then add CSS?

No. It depends on how you and your coworkers like to organize the work.

I’m a fan of quickly tossing something together then refactoring once you have a better idea of the shapes and names of things.

It's a reliable way to make sure people focus on the right thing at the right time. CSS should be an enhancement to the content.

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