11–20 of 91 posts
I think the first paragraph nails it. The people who are good at UX are the people who have the benefit of testing designs with users and iterating on them. Either for the problem at hand or with the benefit of past experience.
As an industry I wish we could get past the idea that your job title denotes your ability in one area or another.
Venting out a bit of past frustration, I would rename the title to "why people suck at explaining desired UX to software developer". A kitchen designer won't be able to guess how you want your kitchen. It's my task as a customer to explain if I want a double sink, how big the induction stove etc. Why do people then expect software developers to magically guess intended UX? Seriously, I asked people to draw me on pape…
From installing a library, to browsing logs. From reading documentation to deploying code. Everything in the developer experience is mined with obscure processes and seemingly impossible to achieve tasks. Every developer eventually figures out a mental framework to work around this experience and consider this a skill that it's part of what makes them good at their job.
Of course developers are very smart, so why they "suck at ux"? The problem is that when your tools and processes are full of bad UX patterns you never get an opportunity to really learn and analyze how well-designed professional and productivity software works. I can't tell you that 60%-70% of the things I know come from using software (many times using it for the sake of learning its UX, not because I'm an actual user). Basically, exposure is key and this is why there are UX designers that also suck at their jobs.
Developers are trapped in this loop. Homegrown tools rarely include input from designers. Startups in the developer space rarely prioritize design hires. They can only build and try to improve what they already know, so the progress in developer experience is very slow. Any progress depends on companies like Microsoft investing in design. For example Visual Studio Code is a wonderful developer experience in my humble opinion. But it takes more than a good IDE or text editor to create that instinct to identify what's good or bad UX.
I wouldn't say that developers suck at UX. They are just not very good at articulating their UX ideas, but some of the best things that I have designed even outside of the developer tools space, came from a developer idea.
If UX designers are so good at empathy, how is it that I, as a developer, keep having to point out that
- making links show up as buttons and vice versa is bad UX,
- mixing heading levels willy-nilly is bad UX,
- bringing in a giant JS framework to make sure a single type of input field works the same for a single buggy browser + OS + device combination (Firefox on Android on Samsung S-something) as for the others is bad UX, and
- basically, how making every new website look and feel different from every existing website may be good for showing off your designer skills, but it has always been bad UX.
From the outside it looks like "design" and "UX" are about as antithetical as "security" and "convenience".
Every software dev should regularly try conducting a couple of five-minute user studies with 1-3 basic tasks.
It was just mind-blowing to realize, see for the first time, even though it had alwayws been there, the mind-boggling amount of extra crap there was in my UI, which was, totally unnecessary for basic use, confusing and unhelpful, etc.
I understand the need for power users as well, so I opted to create two basic "layers" of UI, along with a layer of brief helpful explanations of each control which can also be shown.
There's a lot of work to do, but I've had great results with both power users and novices alike with testing this interface.
Venting out a bit of past frustration, I would rename the title to "why people suck at explaining desired UX to software developer". A kitchen designer won't be able to guess how you want your kitchen. It's my task as a customer to explain if I want a double sink, how big the induction stove etc. Why do people then expect software developers to magically guess intended UX? Seriously, I asked people to draw me on pape…
This article is close, but misses the mark. Talking about how UX researchers must grow up having more empathy sounds like an assumption that's pretty hard to back up, considering I can point to plenty of software engineers that got into the profession because they want to build a better world for others. I have a double degree in something that's effectively user experience. The one thing I heard in school over and o…
I have a theory. I have been designing software for 9 years. I have been designing Developer products for the last 4 years of my career. Let me tell you something. The developer experience is one of the toughest and roughest experiences for anyone who uses software. From installing a library, to browsing logs. From reading documentation to deploying code. Everything in the developer experience is mined with obscure p…
You start with some objectively bad things like bash/terminal/c/c++ and then the tools get replaced with js/electron/etc. From bad to other bad. So giving options, eventually as developer you settle with the less bad or the already understood option.
RARELY you start from good, then move to better.
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P.D: I see this in other fields too (ie: That run in a circle of bad to bad...), from my own customers.
My UX skills are bare (I align things, use 2-3 colors max, and some typography that is barely decent, and point when logos and icons are terrible, and have the sense of just use one made by designers...).
In one app, I just deploy bootstrap as-is with slight increase in font size and base. That was all. I still get kudos for that!