Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium muditha batagoda

I want to live life in the edge

Many years ago before I landed myself in a dream job at 99X technologies as a product designer, I was a front-end developer working basically on web based corporate level applications. I was quite familiar with current trending front-end development technologies at that time. When I started working as a product designer my whole focus was on making designs.

I start missing something..

I believe that a product designer should just not stick to the design process, but also be involved actively in the implementation process to an extent. Then they can help the quality of the product and explore the new dimensions of the designs, so I can produce a better design for better human experience. Better human experience is not about fancy design, it’s about finding proper solutions that fit to real world problems, and problems of your clients.

So What I want to do?

I wanted to understand the limitations and possibilities that a project would undergo when the design was passed down from the design team to the development team, and the level of communication that would associate with it. How crucial is the communication between the design team and the development team?

Let’s point out the necessities in designers being also able to code

Designers don’t go YOLO on designs — This is one of the biggest design issues that I have encounter in the past. Designing solutions that can not be achieved by HTML and CSS will make the tasks time consuming and frustrating to the developers. If the designers engage in front-end coding, they get the ability to understand the limitations and possibilities in the design, as well as what needs to be implemented with the given timeline and budget.
Be creative in design — When working for high-end companies with powerful competitors, seeing ahead in the design (for human experience), as well as improving quality of the output is a must for the designer. When you know how to code you will go though the traditional barriers in what we see in coding, and what actually can be implemented. You can improve your design to be more simple but powerful design.
Communicate effectively with the team as well as the client — As designers we use many tools to show iterations on process flows such as Marvel App, Invision, AxureRP, and many other applications that would help the clients to understand what is going on their products. I was quite amazed by the excitement that clients or user groups have on HTML designs, and the level of interactions they make on them is way higher than other tools. Its not that they don’t like those tools but they are very much familiar with the Web and when they see them.
Support Developers in the process of product development — Product is a collaborative work and requires proper communication between the designers and the developers. Both need to understand how the product should behave when developed, and how the functions should work. If the designers can code HTML and can create the basic animations needed, the developers will get a better idea other than the requirement documents. They can see the developed designs first hand rather than seeing a .psd file and link from a prototyping tool. That would even increase the productivity level of the developers since the doubt in communications is less, and all the initial development is done.

This is how I wanted to proceed as a product designer in the future and I want to improve my coding skills in front-end development and push my self in to a level that I can actively support in the development phase of the product. This is my personal idea about being a product designer, not just a designer but bit of a developer as well. I like to see your suggestions and feedback as well so I can improve my self to be better in the future.

<a href="http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK">http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK</a>

Developer’s day for a Product designer was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Developer’s day for a Product designer

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles