Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I spent a lot of time on UI/UX design between 2004-2014 at Opera, the browser company (on the mobile browsers). Finding someone who was good enough at pixel level graphics design and was capable of iterating like us software people were used to was insanely hard, nevermind the complexities of the UI/UX designs.

I think things have gotten a lot better since then. Now it's routine to see very well-designed apps (and sometimes even websites) from even relatively small national/local entitities that totally nail all three main aspects: GFX/UI & UX (well, and sometimes even transitions/motion design). It's really impressive to see how the field has scaled up. I must assume that the various variants of education are working. (Northern European context.)

View on HN

One thing that helps us (3 person UI UX design team [0]) is to learn to code and write code for side projects frequently.

This helped us be more in sync with engineering teams and allowed us to seemlessly get plugged into teams of Google engineers, Startups etc.

[0] https://fairpixels.pro

I think the more overlap in understanding—better delivery teams perform. That doesn't mean product designers are writing production code or engineers are tweaking designs. But it does mean that designers understand limitations and consistency, while engineers understand what the general experience should feel like. I think that leads to a pretty tight feedback loop where things can be iterated on quickly and there's not a lot of noise with arguing about what's possible or not.

Exactly this

Bingo. The most effective PMs / designers / managers I've worked with as a software engineer spent their energy learning high level technical limitations. What's order-of-magnitude easier; what's harder.

It's difficult to learn because it's experience-based listening and intuiting, without any books that I know of, but it provided a greater boost to team productivity than their learning nuts-and-bolts details.

This applies for most things though. For example, when I got hired at my current place, I didn't know anything about the domain. The more I've learned about the domain the better code I write. Knowing the domain allows me to make informed decisions, discover potential issues etc, rather than just blindly follow some spec.

The main problem is that anyone who can do both is highly incentivized to go into engineering/coding instead of product design. The pay and respect are usually much better. So then that pool is limited further to people who can design and code well, prefer design, and don't need/want extra money.

Then add on to that our current work culture prefers specialists to generalists: HR and exec teams will hire a product designer with 5 years of design experience and no coding over someone with 2 years of design experience and 5 years of software engineering experience.

I don’t find this to be the case. I’m a senior designer at a FAANG and chose this over being a SWE. And nowadays, the salaries are very competitive between pm, design and eng.

When I was earlier in my career it was a major struggle to stop coding. every place out of university would say there was some kind of design opportunity for me, but then I’d find myself implementing mine and other designers features. I’m glad that’s over.

Anecdotally, I’ve met several eng -> PM and Eng -> design transfers, probably all possible to the leveling of pay and prestige.

I stand corrected! Thanks.

I’ll second Foreignborn’s comment. I potentially could have gone the engineering route. I chose product design mostly because I enjoyed it more and felt like I was a stronger designer than engineer. I don’t see much difference in pay or respect. I suppose it depends on the org and whether product design is strategic though.

Speaking as a former developer, current designer, I agree that all designers should have some familiarity with the medium they're working in, in addition to the domain they're working in. An industrial designer should learn something about fabrication and manufacturing, and a software designer should learn to code. They don't have to become experts, but ignoring such an enormous aspect of your field for your entire career would be a missed opportunity. I hesitate to call it irresponsible, but to be candid that's personally that's how I view it. Call it an invaluable benefit.

I like to say, design without consideration for manufacturing is art. In the context of business, design is not a tool for doing art.

I find coding to be a useful skill when collaborating with developers and for writing my own prototypes, but it is not very valuable for getting jobs as it is rarely a required skill.

Encourage your designer friends to understand the constraints of HTML and CSS. Without that understanding, the ouput from the design team often looks more like print media.

Can you share some examples of apps from smaller entities that you think are well-designed?

https://skunkworks.ae.studio/

I'm not seeing anything here that makes me think "this is good design", but maybe I'd need to sign up for each product. I saw some cute landing pages and some Typeforms. Were you directing to me to something specific?

Could you share something that does make you think "this is good design"?

I guess I happen to be really focused on certain types of apps/services right now, but off the top of my head: Twilio, Heroku, Enchant, Robinhood, McMaster-Carr (which was shared on here recently), Linear.app. Probably a lot more, but these are apps that deliver a ton of complex functionality and make the components you need accessible easily without creating cognitive overload as a user.

Scale is relative. I'm impressed by e.g. these Scandinavian apps: Postnord (!), Avanza, Hemnet, NRK TV, Instabox. There are perhaps 300-400 more of roughly equal quality in Scandinavia. For most of these: the maximum adressable audience (the population) is 5-10M and they still they reach a super high level of polish.

I always thought NRK TV was so well done and beautiful, glad to find someone else that feels the same way :)

Thanks

These are all quite nice, thanks for sharing. Wish I could read Swedish :P (or are these Danish? Finnish?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com