Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Nathan Allsopp

You need to add more than just design.

Photo by Mia Baker on Unsplash

As an interface designer, our typical focus is on the look and feel of an interface. We are engaged by clients to design something that they (and their users) will find visually pleasing.

However, the task of designing an interface inherently involves more than just its look and feel. As a designer you have to wear many different hats beyond just design.

We need to have a stack of different skills to ensure we not only deliver interfaces that look good, but work well. Designers need to have a “product brain” – an overall understanding of how products are created, managed and shipped. Here’s why.

1 — Designing an interface involves finding a visual way to solve a problem

While you may be hired as a designer, it is your design skills that play a key role in the way that a product solves a problem. You may be provided a worded solution from the client, but a worded solution does not equal the visual solution. You have to consider the best way to represent items, what medium they are in, where they are placed, what makes sense to a user and more. Problem-solving skills make you invaluable in helping companies not only craft their design, but also their product.

2 — You need to understand how feasible your design is from a development perspective

We often as designers can end up creating magnificent interfaces that become a nightmare to code. While some may take the attitude that the developer simply needs to lift their game, you need to focus more on the situation. Who is the interface for? A young startup may not have the time or money to deliver something complicated, and as a result decide to water-down your ideas. You have to identify the needs and situation of a client in order to ensure your design matches accordingly.

3 — Look and feel does not equal usability

As a designer, you need to carefully navigate the trade-offs involved in how visually pleasing your design is versus how usable it is. This can manifest in ways such as a higher number of buttons, filters, pop-up items, fields, longer text fields, more photos, tool-tips and so on. These may be key to a user being able to navigate the interface effectively, but add clutter to your design. Being able to balance UI and UX concerns helps you potentially deliver your client better engagement results than just giving them a pretty interface.

4 — Every product is different, so you have to design for the situation

As designers, we need to align our design approach with the company’s product strategy. Some products solve very complex problems in simple ways, while others solve simple problems in complex ways. There is no right or wrong answer, as often different target markets are involved. As a result, your ability to understand a company’s product strategy and replicate that into a design is invaluable in delivering awesome interfaces and scoring more work.

This article originally appeared on my blog here

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Why interface designers need to also have a product brain was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why interface designers need to also have a product brain

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