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Why Software Developers Suck at UX

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Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#31

Post by brundolf »

This goes beyond UX: it affects API design, it affects communication within a team, documentation quality, etc. As a programmer who is able to put myself in others' shoes, it is deeply exhausting to have someone try to explain a new part of a system to me who doesn't have the ability to put themselves in my shoes. Leaving out key details left and right, foregoing analogies that in hindsight would have made things go so much more smoothly, phrasing things in ways that are very blatantly going to be ambiguous to an outsider's ears.

It's probably not fair to judge simply because I personally don't have that issue, but it's one of the most frustrating recurring experiences in my professional life.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#32

Post by brundolf »

bichiliad wrote: post #7

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 think the word "empathy" is an overloaded term and was the wrong one for the author's point. Some people take it to mean "the ability to care about others on a moral level", and others take it to mean "the emotional intelligence to detect and understand the nuances of another's thoughts and feelings". I believe the author was talking about the second, not the first. It's entirely possible to be an idealistic and good-hearted person without having a shred of emotional intelligence.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#33

Post by rriepe »

This feels backwards to me. Software developers suck at UX because they are too empathetic. Products get bloated because engineers get emotionally attached to the work and can't cut anything because there's always someone's feelings attached.

Meanwhile all the good UX people I've known have been either exceedingly impatient or obsessively narcissistic. The ones who empathize do so with the people right in front of them, their co-workers not the user, and end up compromising the product.

The person with an abundance of empathy is going to consider John's feelings when throwing out six weeks of his work. But stuff like that doesn't matter at all to the user.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#34

Post by filoeleven »

TwoBit wrote: post #22
l0b0 wrote: post #15

> I think great UX designers just grew up naturally having much more empathy towards others and having a much better ability to place themselves in others shoes and see the world from their eyes. 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…

Isn't the motivation for arbitrarily unique design to stand out? To look like you aren't just another commodity web site and product?

Standing out visually is helpful for branding, but the unique designs that succeed usually occur when presenting the relevant data in a useful way. So understanding helpful mappings is key.

For example, I switched to iTunes when it was first released on Windows mainly because of the “artist | album | song” as a row of lists interface. It wasn’t a new interface: Smalltalk used something like it for code, and OSX had it as a display option for file browsing before then too I think. But it was such a big improvement over Winamp for quickly finding the album or song I wanted to hear. IIRC Winamp at the time was a direct map over folders, and they were just vertical trees. When I switched, I had to do a bunch of tagging, but it was still worth it. If iTunes had used a gmail-like “tag and search” interface, I don’t think it would have been as compelling. I’m still waiting for something like it in Windows Explorer.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#35

Post by brundolf »

I posted this in a thread below, but I think the word "empathy" is an overloaded term and was the wrong one for the author's point. Some people take it to mean "the ability to care about others on a moral level", and others take it to mean "the emotional intelligence to detect and understand the nuances of another's thoughts and feelings". But those are independent things, and I believe the author was talking about the second, not the first. It's entirely possible to be an idealistic and good-hearted person without having the least bit of emotional intelligence. Conversely, it's entirely possible to have lots of emotional intelligence and use it to manipulate people instead of help them.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#36

Post by adrianmonk »

brundolf wrote: post #35

I posted this in a thread below, but I think the word "empathy" is an overloaded term and was the wrong one for the author's point. Some people take it to mean "the ability to care about others on a moral level", and others take it to mean "the emotional intelligence to detect and understand the nuances of another's thoughts and feelings". But those are independent things, and I believe the author was talking about t…

I was just about to say this. Caring about another person's needs or sensing their feeling is one thing. Being able to set aside your own view, shift your mindset, and put yourself in someone else's shoes is another thing.

You probably need at least some of the first, though, because the second one takes real effort.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#37

Post by brundolf »

adrianmonk wrote: post #36
brundolf wrote: post #35

I posted this in a thread below, but I think the word "empathy" is an overloaded term and was the wrong one for the author's point. Some people take it to mean "the ability to care about others on a moral level", and others take it to mean "the emotional intelligence to detect and understand the nuances of another's thoughts and feelings". But those are independent things, and I believe the author was talking about t…

I was just about to say this. Caring about another person's needs or sensing their feeling is one thing. Being able to set aside your own view, shift your mindset, and put yourself in someone else's shoes is another thing. You probably need at least some of the first, though, because the second one takes real effort.

I don't think you even need to be able to sense others' specific needs or feelings to care about making the world a better place.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#38

Post by adrianmonk »

brundolf wrote: post #37
adrianmonk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just about to say this. Caring about another person's needs or sensing their feeling is one thing. Being able to set aside your own view, shift your mindset, and put yourself in someone else's shoes is another thing. You probably need at least some of the first, though, because the second one takes real effort.

I don't think you even need to be able to sense others' specific needs or feelings to care about making the world a better place.

That's fair. You might do it just because of pride in your work or because you want the software to succeed. Maybe I should say that if making someone's experience better is meaningful to you personally, that adds to the motivation.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#39

Post by azinman2 »

> I imagine that it’s like when you’re trying to explain something technologically mundane in your world, say, Instagram Stories, to your grandma who can barely send email

This trope needs to go away. Your grandma might be Ada Lovelace, or any other uber technically minded person. Same with your mom. This is both sexist and agist. Notice how they never talk about 'your dad,' in this example, which I personally find hilarious because in my family my mom is the technical one and my dad has the most trouble with any technology. These are the kinds of 'microagressions' that I know first hand have turned women off CS.

Re: Why Software Developers Suck at UX

#40

Post by pfraze »

Some devs do lack empathy for users, but that's a trope with lots of professions. I think it's more...

1. UX is a skill you need to train separately from the rest of your engineering skillset and not everybody does. I strongly recommend "Refactoring UI" to get some fast training.

2. Not everybody does user testing where you sit down with new users and watch them use it. Until you've done that multiple times, you won't develop a good intuition for how people approach new software. I recommend this to everyone, just do it. It's an essential training tool as well as an essential product-development process.

3. Every project is driven by competing feature ideas, often in an exploratory way. Everyone has feature requests, and engineers often think in terms of exposing knobs to adjust because they want to expose the underlying power of the system. The problem is, humans have a very limited budget of concepts they can take in from a UI, and the information architecture of a UI is holistic. "Just one more feature" can throw the entire thing out of balance. This factor alone makes it easy to make bad UIs.

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