Ask HN: How do you balance coding and UI/UX work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you balance coding and UI/UX work?

4 pointsprateekdayal5 comments

Hi,

Ryan from 37 signals mentions a very important point in his talk ( http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2608-ryans-talk-at-future-of-web-apps-2010-london) about developers creating UI that look like a visual manifestation of the database schemas.

I have also been thinking about this for a while as I juggle both development and UX work. To develop really usable screens, you have to wear the UI/UX hat and think from the user's perspective. May be you need to drop some not so often needed fields from a form or highlight some information on a page.

Typically I have to step away from code once in a while to look at things from a user's perspective. If you are a doing both coding and UI/UX work, how do you make this switch? Do you keep separate days for coding and UI/UX or you have a process that you follow. I would love to know what works well for hackers here.

Thanks, Prateek

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At the beginning of the last century there was a design movement called Arts and Crafts. Think Frank Lloyd Wright. In America the movement focused on creating art that was beautiful and still true to the source materials.

It feels like web development needs a similar philosophy. Surely there are many movements stirring right now, but few seem to have a strong voice that inspires those beyond the field.

Which is to say: perhaps try looking at development as one role. Start by finding ways to talk about design and engineering as one.

Read some Louis Sullivan, or other modernists architects and see how they were forced to change their notion of beauty as new methods and materials like building with steel and glass changed what a building could be.

In woodwork, you can build something with screws and nails or you can you use the much stronger and more beautiful dovetail joint, or mortise and tenon. What are the parallels in web development?

Design and engineering are not mutually exclusive.

You might consider flipping the question...

Pick a metric: (new user signups, weekly users, whatever) Which will help improve that metric? improved UX/I or more features/better code base.

Back it up with analytics/funnel analysis. If you spend time on your UX/I, and your signups increase, keep doing it. If your increase in signups start to flatten after X iterations, think about another way, such as SEO or coding more features that new customers are asking for.

as someone who does both, but is primarily a UI/UX guy. I'll design the interfaces first. Then I'll design the database, then start developing. Everything seems to fall into place that way for me.

Once you have the first working screens, how do you iterate? Do you update your mockups and then go back to code or do you just update views in code directly?

at that point I'm going to really make changes at a code level - unless I need to get the changes approved or understood by others (which is why I'd show them some new mockups/screens). Iterations can be done so much faster working directly in the view code.

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