Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jessica Lascar

This article is a follow up of my Should designers code… or should developers design? article and an extract of my talk given at SwiftConf’17.

For long time, developers and designers have been considered like two creatures coming from different planets or, even worse, enemies. But truth is, designers and developers are not so different from each other. This is why having a better understanding of what the other does can really play a huge part when it comes to building products together as, at the end of the day, we all develop and we all design something.

Do developers understand what designers do?

I’m don’t believe many developers know exactly how designers work or what we really do all day. They might as well think of us as pixels movers.

But design is not about about pretty visuals, it’s about solving problems.

You might not be aware of it, but we’re all subconsciously affected by both good and bad design everyday in our lives.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman showed how design affects even in the little things, with a famous example about doors handles:

He claims that doors shouldn’t come with instructions as their usage should be intuitively simple. But we all know that this is not case with the doors pictured above. In fact, how would you open the one on the right?

This is an example of bad design that affects our lives. Instead, when done right, design can make a huge difference.

What do designers do, then?

In my previous article What is Product Design?, I tried to explain what we designers do by referencing a scene from the movie The Founder, which I highly recommend you to watch.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/87abd691b8d3db1ca64f16625f0d8e9d/href">https://medium.com/media/87abd691b8d3db1ca64f16625f0d8e9d/href</a>

In summary, in this scene, we can see the two McDonald brothers turning a tennis court into a giant prototype for a restaurant’s kitchen by simply drawing the floor plan with a piece of chalk and testing the workflow and furniture/appliances disposition with their employees. Their goal was to solve the “drive-in problem” by preparing burgers in 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes. Every time something didn’t feel right or if it wasn’t fast enough, they iterated the structure. They did this over and over, until they figured out the most efficient process and appliances disposition to achieve their goal, thus finding the perfect design solution. They even had to build custom made appliances to achieve that!

By doing that, the McDonald brothers operated exactly as Product Designers: they started by defining the problem, produced some low-fidelity mock ups, prototyped and validated their approach through user testing and ultimately crafted the best possible solution for the problem at hand.

Developers, be involved from the beginning!

Early involvement ensures that everybody stays on the same page with the right focus at all times.

Don’t think that just because the designers are in charge of the creation of wireframes and prototypes, you have nothing to offer at that stage. In fact, I’d say that developers’ early contribution is fundamental as it helps designers making more informed decisions. This also helps avoiding situations where developers are shown a design that’s completely impossible to build or missing edge cases only because the designers worked in silos.

At carwow, we improved our relationship with developers by making them part of our process since the beginning and by ensuring constant communication. Doing so has helped us a lot. They now tend to look at problems from a different angle and are more keen in offering ideas and suggestions then before. Many times they contribute with something that we wouldn’t have normally thought about.

This is why it’s important that designers work in parallel with developers. You achieve this when it becomes difficult to tell where development begins and design ends as they both influence each other.

How devs can improve design understanding

Collaboration is key, but it’ also important for developers to learn just enough design to foster the relationship. I can safely say that the best developers I’ve worked with have a good understanding of design. Grasping the essentials is enough, developers don’t have to be great designers to make this work!

Maybe some of you might not yet be convinced why developers need to know more about design and you may think it’s not important. You may already work with a designer or developer and everything might be working smoothly. However, I think it’s really important that developers start acquiring an eye for design and for companies to encourage this empathy among teams. Otherwise you might end up in a situation like this:

In this funny comic strip, we can see a developer attempting a design which is not user friendly at all, but they couldn’t see it because of their lack of design knowledge.

Learning about design can also improve the way you think about software in general. There are a lot of developers who don’t think about their users when building products. This might be because they don’t have been as involved in the design and planning for the user experience and therefore view their job as to merely building the functionality.

The more informed you are, the more time you’ll save, and the better job you’ll do.

Example of developer with design focus

If you’re still not convinced about the importance of design, then maybe I can convince you by citing a famous design-focused developer who gave an incredible contribution to the tech world: Loren Brichter, A.K.A. the creator of the innovative Pull-To-Refresh interaction.

This interaction is now adopted as a standard in a lot of iOS, Mac and Android apps. Thanks to his design-focused approach, Loren was able to spot a problem, design the solution, implement it, ship it… and the rest is history.

Conclusions

Designers and developers have so much in common and, only by learning each other’s process and quirks, we can definitely produce better work.

Thanks to the power of collaboration, developers can understand better the reasoning behind certain design decisions, while designers can have a better understanding of how things work.

The more we understand what our colleagues do and the more we learn from them, the higher the chance of creating a better solution. Let’s learn how to appreciate each side for what they contribute and we’ll all be the better for it.

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In their shoes: developers understanding designers was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In their shoes: developers understanding designers

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