Hi, I’m a UX Developer - You’re a what?
uxmag.com
uxmag.com
Here are the three big quotes that are making me nervous:
"It’s our job to help translate their vision to the development team in a way that they can understand and accept"
"Similarly, we need to speak on behalf the developers to help reign in the designers, at times."
"However, for the traditional developer the application works if it executes all of the items listed in the functional specs. The focus of the traditional developer is centered on tasks rather than goals."
Oh man. So the role of a UX developer is to stand in between the developers and designers and represent the interests of each for us? All the while, assuming that the mindset of a "traditional" developer is to be myopically focused on tasks rather than goals?
Everything I read about UX as a skill set I like. Developers and Designers should be focused on goals. We should strive to acquire the skills and mindset that are often associated with "UX" (good developers were doing this long before "UX" became a term or job category).
Everything I read about UX as an actual job role, I don't like. I can't stand the idea of a worker in my organization deciding that developers are focused on tasks and need someone running interference between them and the users and designers.
As I've pointed out in other discussions around UX on HN, one key question is to ask yourself: would this person be useful on a small team? A developer or designer with lots of "UX" skill would be even more useful on a small team. But the type of person described through this post? Not really, and could even do harm by mucking up the relationship between developers, designers, and the things that they actually need to be exposed to to write good software.
In short, I believe that UX is a great addition to a developer or designer's skill set, but I'm not at all convinced that it would be a great job category.
"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?" :)
My advise is to simply wear many hats; especially to keep clowns like these "UXD" types out of your company.
Much more gratifying for me, as someone with both taste and technical background, is my current role where I just do everything. Prototype, build, design and ship apps and the whole loop closes inside my own head. But I have very specific experience for this – I don't know how often this is really practical.
Either way, I'd probably hate having a "UX guy" hovering around putting his dick into everything I'm working on. I suspect the only time "UX guy" can really, truly work as its own role is when you're CEO or some other autonomous leadership figure.
Designer - How application will look?
UX - How application will feel?
this leaves managers with traffic between sales/clients, designers, UX bullshitters and developers. It leaves designers with making the wireframes look better. It leaves developers with production work.
UX developer: "we should do this and this and this." Developer: "yes master"
To me UX is a set of skills that designers and developers should learn and earn. That what makes a Designer and a Developer: SENIOR. What is seniority then? Speed? CEO: "Yes this is our senior designer. He can design a website in 5 minutes. He's senior because he knows all Photoshop shortcuts and is fast with the tools. By the way, his designs look nice and he follows everything the UX Designer tells him to."
Like in iOS, for example, when it does that little bounce thing when you reach the end of a scroll view. That is something a UX designer would design. As opposed to a visual designer who would make it look pretty.
As a designer and developer, I boggles my mind that not all programmers can do design work. Likewise, it seems strange that visual designers can't also do interaction design. However, in the real world most people in this space seem to be more specialized. A visual designer cannot necessarily make a good functioning interface, hence the need for someone else to fill that gap.
I don't know what the middle-man between designers and developers is all about. We can communicate just fine and wouldn't be the job of a user experience person, by my definition, anyway.
As Steve Jobs said, "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Your visual designer that can't make an interface is someone I might describe as a [graphic] artist.
Semantics, I know, but a differentiation that I (thankfully) helps to reduce the use of "UX" in job titles -- a trend I've come to dislike.
However, not all developers are really good. Sometimes you have to bring in someone to work on the design, allowing the programmer to focus on stable and performing code. That is why we have come to have designers and developers.
Similarly, not all designers are really good. Sometimes you have to bring in someone who can focus on the experience while letting the other designer focus on the style. And that is why we're starting to see multiple people take on the different design roles.
Becoming really good at your craft is hard. Some people haven't spent the time required to become really good, or don't have the interest, or in very rare cases are incapable.
Because really good people are hard to find, businesses are forced to break up the jobs up to allow multiple people to fill their niche. I don't know if it is the right thing, but I'm not sure what else can be done. We can't all hire Apple's top talent, even if money was no object.
A kickass designer + kickass developer [+ kickass writer] will create a better user experience than a self-proclaimed "UX designer/developer/guru" any day.
I mean, if you are really going to set out to hire only the best, why even look at people who are just a designer or developer? Why not hire the person who is kickass at designing, developing, and writing?
Someone who has intimate knowledge of all areas of software development is going to build a better product than three people who are only skilled in their limited subsets.
I'm not so much irked by "UX Designers", as they have a seemingly useful role if you consider what they claim. Many of their practices however are laughable at best and rarely accomplish their stated goals.
Why should I trust your soft approach to UX? If I'm paying you 70,000 a year, that means you should be providing more than 70,000 a year worth of value - Otherwise theres not really much point in hiring you. Can any UX designer, even in principle, provide more than modest value for sites whose users don't number into the 10s of millions? Keep in mind that its not the difference between no design and a good design when you hire a UX designer, Its the difference between a design generated by someone who isn't a UX professional (but probably is willing to read up on the elements of successful design) and a UX professional who.... possesses no real qualifications or mechanism to distinguish him from the non-UX professional save his assertion that he "has an eye for design". You could hire a High school graduate with an interest in technology, offer to pay him 25k/yr to sit in a comfy chair and write out jquery + html and be absolutely stoked about it, how much more of a value proposition do you get out of a "UX designer"?
I want to clarify this isn't a dig against people who truly provide value and make a difference for users - Theres some UX & UI people out there who are changing the face of their businesses by the work of their own hands and their untamable passion for the human enterprise. But those people would have likely kicked ass anyway.
So I suppose lastly, I'd be distrustful as a rule of most people who claim to generate value through soft, rather than hard means. Historically you would not be unwise to bet on the success of Mathematics and the failure of subjective analysis in virtually every field ranging from analyzing human emotions to machine translation, even fields traditionally decried for being approached mathematically (Because surely a human can only understand what makes up being human?) have been absolutely revolutionized by using an approach that has been working for the past 10k years of human history - Application of cold logic and lots and lots of hard work.
So whats someone who isn't a "science person" to do in an era that increasingly marginalizes those who cannot do hard mental labor? Well you do the only thing you can do with nothing but time on your hands - You market yourself.
[P.S - If you want UX/UI people who aren't full of their own shit, a truly excellent ex-coworker of mine - Sam Asante @ http://samasante.com/ is currently looking for a job in San Francisco]
I'm sympathetic to you, because I'm the "hard" science guy. When I studied CS, it was about hard science, because there generally weren't consumer facing jobs to be had.
But now most of the successful apps, and the ones talked about on HN aren't technically difficult. The reason things like the Thiel fund even are on the radar is because most apps, whether mobile or web, could be coded up by a modestly bright 13 year-old. Seriously. The part that separates great from forgotten is the UX and design.
There was once a popular saying that went something like, "Well he's no rocket scientist". I think its fair to say that we'll likely not hear people say, "Well he's no computer programmer". In fact if anything quite the opposite -- "Anyone can learn it... it's like programming".
Until today reading this post I thought UX is just the hip new word for HUI. Now I find that HUI has been split into two different specialties.
More and more people being added to each part of the task is not a good thing because the interface needs to be consistent and coherent, not broken into pieces each designed by a different group with a different philosophy. Oh sure there can be some document saying what the philosophy is supposed to be; but mission statements are not designs.
The greatest interfaces I have seen there was exactly one person in charge of deciding how everything works and that was guided by his personal philosophy of design.
Very curious what they're learning...
- There are front-end engineers who care more about how the user perceives the product than how fellow engineers might perceive their architecture. These engineers obsess about things like UI responsiveness, framerates, and page loading times. They take user studies with a grain of salt, but they deeply respect them. They do not like it when other designers or engineers complain about "stupid users" that just don't understand their interface. They understand when it's time to scrap a month of work on a UI that just doesn't seem to be clicking, and get on with the next version instead of digging in their heels. Then again, some people just call these good front-end engineers.
- There are managers who prioritize the user experience above all else. They make sure the people under them do as well. They personally try out and approve all major product features and liberally cut, prune, and edit where they think things are too confusing. They make the hard decisions. They throw away hard-earned features that just don't quite cut it. They understand that the quality of the final product is their responsibility, and the quality of a product is increasingly being judged almost solely on the quality of its user experience. Sometimes these are just called good managers.
IMO, a UX person is just someone who cares. More about the user than about themselves.
That said, I think there is a valid new profession somewhere between designer and front-end engineer. Static mock images don't let you explore certain kinds of very dynamic interfaces (touch-based ones especially). The ability to actually program a demo that moves provides incredible insight into the design process, but most designers are incapable of doing so. I don't know what to call such a person, even though I am one.
Let me tell you what a UX developer is. UX developers are people that couldn't find themselves neither as designers or as developers and got stuck in between. Those became so many over the years; people interested not in being perfect at doing one thing, but at being intermediate in everything. Others are project managers who gained some experience in handling projects, but got bored of all the wire-framing, analysis and actually doing nothing (at least the majority), so they decided to get more involved in projects on a technical/creative level.
The first group, the stuck-in-between, become UX designers/developers with a few technical tricks. The second group, the managers, became UX analysts and experts.
So, in reality, your job as UX designer/developer, is to make real Designers dumb, by not letting them learn how to create usable designs, but designs that follow your lead and your wire-frames which eventually affect real Designers creativity. Or maybe real Designers are too dumb to learn how to offer the user a good experience! The UX developers, on the other hand, don't have an actual role. So if you're doing the wire-framing, the analysis, the content management, the information architecture, can you please specify what is a project manager doing? Plus, if your skills enables you to prototype certain features, what if you're involved in a super complex project, who's gonna prototype now? I know, the one who actually does the prototyping and is actually a real Programmer that knows his language very well and knows its actual limitations. Not the ones UX developers heard about.
The real definition for your job is ripped of from something every human should learn how to do and that's communication.
"Let me tell you what a UX developer is. UX developers are people that couldn't find themselves neither as designers or as developers and got stuck in between."
While I find your tone particularly hateful, this is about as close to being the best definition of how I see a UX developer/designer, without the derogatory tone of course. They are people who want to be involved in the earlier stages of a project, and want to know about the technical aspects of the problem and the design or brand constraints, and are suitably equipped to deal with the people whose job it is to solve the intricate details.
If you are a developer who can turn out a decent user interface, (maybe on a web app you were left to do the settings page), or a designer who can prototype in Javascript to show how modals windows work - congratulations, that is UX - converging the different disciplines to create a whole. Someone who works more in doing that and deals less with the nitty gritty of one or the other is just doing it more, (and probably better for the time and experience they have). Thats not to say because they don't do the nitty gritty that they can't, (although I'll admit my design skills trail off before my technical skills do), its just they are more interested in leaving it to others.
[Aside: I am a technical guy who has moved much more towards doing prototyping and UX work. I find alot of the comments in this thread pretty insulting since they all are assuming I am either a shite designer or shite developer.]
I have found a degree in Computer Science, and the skill set of a developer, to be more of a handicap than a blessing when looking for the right jobs. Outside of the startup world, people tend to think that if you can code, you are best put away in a murky corner and left alone while other people determine the direction of the product. Interaction and User Experience design is then left to people with a background in graphics design.
Just because you cannot code, does not mean that I cannot design.
In the end it is more about skills than about roles though. I think having some passion about design and your user makes you a better developer and having some years of programming experience under your belt makes you a better designer.
>> "Similarly, we need to speak on behalf the developers to help reign in the designers, at times. If they are coming up with concepts that will be extremely difficult or time consuming to implement, we can explain the limitations of the technology and the complexity involved in implementing their designs"
I dislike this stereotype that developers can't communicate and work side-by-side with designers, and vice versa. It seems the writer thinks developers can't communicate or speak and need someone to translate for them, like they're a machine. It's quite disparaging, actually.
I also see a danger in having a middleman, so to speak. Things can get lost in translation.
Also it doesn't have to be a middle-man. 3-way communication usually works fine.
Regarding @geebee "putting developers into a box where they are simply executing specs" I think that the "developer driven culture" has gotten us to the point where we have forgotten that there need to be _a single_ person in charge of designing the product. Otherwise it will be impossible to keep the product integrity. Read The Mythical Man-Month.
Also, the "spec" isn't some kind of pseudo-code. It can be the user manual, a design document or a prototype. Actually, it MUST NOT include any implementation details, since that is up to the developer to decide. It's his domain, he knows that better than anyone else. If the developer feel that he misses out on something, maybe he should try to be a product designer instead. But for the sake of the product, he shouldn't be both.
If we go this route we'll have Business Programmers, Performance Designers and the like :)
The key benefit of a UX developer is the prototype and product are one and the same, and are created with useable code rather than mock-ups. This allows refinement and iteration all the way through production. We're not so focused on UI, because that's easy to create with static mock-ups. UX development takes the next step to determine how the different static UIs work with actual code and users.
A key difference between UX dev and UI dev: the UX dev won't worry about skins and other design parts. It's more about the layout, functionality, and ease of use. Once that's worked out, a designer can make it clean.
At a previous company, I tried over and over to get them to hire a 'front-end developer', when what I really wanted was a UX Developer. I don't think knowing the term would have made any difference in convincing them, though.
The other hard bit is making companies understand why they need one.
UX Designer: Here's the mockup.
App dev: Did you notice the page layout falls apart when you resize the browser? You need to add a few float clear divs to fix it.
UX Designer: Oh. Uh, how do you do that? Can you fix it?
App dev: Yes. Now go away.