Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ce Manalang

Can two different fields pair up to build better user experience?

This is a transcript of a presentation I gave few months ago in a local Dribble Meetup

Hi I am Ce. I am from the Product Development Team of Deal Grocer and I agree with Mr. Norman when he said that,

Everyone is a designer. Yes. You and me. Everyone. I know it’s quite hard to believe especially if all your career life you’ve grown to be otherwise. Like me.

I started out as a backend developer

and along the way I met front-end development. Immediately fell in love with it because of how it excites my creativity.

And then one day when I am ready to focus and run away with front-end development, I found that I can’t just leave backend development behind. Yes, I have lost interest in backend development along the way but I realize that when it is fused together with front-end development they bring out better user experience.

So now, I am doing (trying to do) both.

A full-stack developer, some people might say.

Personally, I think the term is quite broad and I know that I am still a long way to go from becoming one so I really can’t say that I am a full-stack developer. ‘fool-stack’, maybe.

Having said that (and also because everyone is a designer), I designed my own term. I think I am more at peace to be called a customer-end developer, or in other words, I love our customers so much I will write code that will bring valuable products to them in whatever end it may be.

Value. What is Value? How can we bring value? How do we know if what we bring is valuable? Why should we care about value?

In our industry, it’s easy to do things just because we want to do it. We’re very creative and resourceful plus we have every bit of technology to back us up. But the experience of doing these things is better if we do them in such a way that they will be valuable to others especially to our target audience. But how do we know if our work will bring value?

By measuring. Data. By doing the Build-Measure-Learn process

First is we design. And then we build. And then we measure how our audience respond to the thing that we built. And then we analyse all those that we measured and learn from it. And then we’re back to designing and building again but this time based on the data or the learnings. What are the things that we should be measuring? and how?

What to measure?

page speed
page views
clicks / heat maps
scrolldepth
user behavior
customer feedback

How?

Really depends on the business goal but the simplest way is by using Google Analytics. We’re actually very lucky because it is still a free tool. We also have Crazy Egg for heatmaps / scrolldepth. And for recording user behavior, we have Hotjar. Again it really depends on the business goal.

Why should we care about bringing valuable work by measuring and gathering data?

[Data ? Design 4EVER!]

Doing things that we love will make us happy for (maybe) a day or two but doing things that we know our customers will love will make us happy for as long as we continue on.

And that’s the contentment that Data brought to Design when Design met Data.

To answer the question at the beginning of this article, Yes they can.

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

When Design met Data 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.

When Design met Data

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles