English vs. Klingon, or why designers and developers don’t understand each other

10 years ago I started a course on interaction design. It was a one-year program at the University of Leuven in Belgium. The first thing I learned there came as quite a shock to me. Cause I was doing it myself.

An engineer will program a feature… just because he can

I had been a programmer for all my life. Never worried about user experiences. After all, I was a user too. So I knew what I needed to do when I designed an application for them. So whenever I got another brilliant idea while programming, I quickly added a feature. Did my users ask for it? No. But hey, they were just users. What do they know about applications? I’m the expert, so they can be oh so thankful to have a great developer like me that thinks in their place.

“You were so wrong Marc”

Fast forward to now. I always introduce myself as a user researcher trapped inside the body of a programmer. By now I understand the importance of user experience. It takes a lot of work. And a lot of user testing. Loads of iterations, going back and forth to come up with the ideal UI.

2 years ago at Devoxx, I attended Joe Nuxoll’s talk. He explained that for the design of the Tesla UI, they did like 50 iterations for the dashboard screen. It drove the Tesla engineers mad. We can only imagine the pain Joe must have had. When he tried to explain the developers why they needed to make a change, yet again.

Today not much has changed, unfortunately. Developers still think they are users. They still take the liberty to make changes if they see it necessary. Let me tell you. Dear developers.

“You are not UX designers.”

Heck, even I am confronted with this phenomena in my own startups. One of my startups is SuperFriends, a digital friendship book for children. For the iOS app, I do all the coding and graphic design. Together with a colleague I also define the UX workflow.

But then this happens. We agree on a new workflow. Then I change hats and start coding. When I’m finished my colleague calls me up. I hear these dreaded words that make me angry almost every time.

“Hey Marc, I think we should change that last workflow you just implemented”.

It is strange right? I am a User researcher. But in this case, I wear a developer hat. Deep down I know he is right. Because our user studies showed us showed us the pain points in our app. But the fact that I programmed this thing, makes it somehow my baby. I’ve become that developer again.

“Anyone touching my baby is my enemy”

So yes. There will always be a big gap between designers and developers. I speak both languages. But even then. It’s hard to understand each others reasoning when you are in a different context. An engineer wants to bring logic into the world. He is proud of what he build. A designer wants to put common sense into stuff. So that means changing the things the developer just made. Somehow these worlds don’t match.

NOTE: A designer represents the user. And the user is always right. Even though the developer thinks they are wrong.
As always there are exceptions to the rule.