How to Make Your Mark as a UI Developer
TLDR; It’s difficult to stand out among your peers and make your mark as a developer today. By learning the fundamentals of UX and applying them throughout your career, you will add tangible value to the products you work on — this is how I tripled my salary in less than 5 years, and you can too.
The Dispensable Developer
In my 11-year career I have been fortunate enough to experience working for both scrappy startups and Fortune 500 companies. Much of my career was spent working as a developer, but I’ve spent the last several years working in various leadership roles.
Throughout this time I witnessed firsthand how difficult it is for a developer to stand out among his/her peers. When a developer follows protocol and doesn’t find a unique way to add value, he/she is at risk of being labeled dispensable.
Yikes — that’s harsh.
I know what many of you are thinking — everyone is dispensable — and technically you are right; however, a developer who manufactures value by leveraging a unique set of skills is harder to replace than one who offers nothing but the status quo.
Challenging the Status Quo
Most companies have a somewhat structured process in place to help developers stay busy and be productive — it varies greatly from company to company, but it generally looks something like this:
- A developer, let’s call her Alice, is assigned a task — building a new header for the website.
- Alice reviews the task and immediately begins to think about the technical requirements for the new header — Does the header require any new data? How am I going to implement this search box? Is the old header tightly coupled to any other components or services?
- She begins solving the technical challenges she uncovers, writing neat, well-documented code that brings joy to peers that review it.
- Once completed, her new header is approved by QA and gets deployed to production.
- Alice’s task is complete, and she can happily move on to the next one.
In order to manufacture value, challenge the processes imposed upon you in order to identify ways that you — specifically — can improve them.
I have used this technique with great success throughout my career — it has enabled me to quickly build a reputation and gain respect in every company I’ve ever worked for.
Your desire to challenge the status quo will be perceived by your peers as passion and pride for your work.
Passion is contagious
It can have a profound effect on the performance and moral of any team.
Choose Your Own Adventure
There are many ways that a developer can add value to the development process—but for me, it was this
- Learn the fundamentals of UX
- Begin work on a new feature with a personal UX review
- Before starting development, share my feedback to product/design
- Collaborate with them to improve the UX of the feature
When considering the process in the hypothetical example above, the UI of the header is an afterthought for Alice — just a skin to slap on top of her nice new module — and she gave no consideration whatsoever to it’s UX.
Developing a feature without scrutinizing it’s UX is the status quo — we can do better
Challenging and improving this widely accepted process—by implementing a UX feedback loop before starting development—has played a key role in my success.
It has allowed me to rapidly climb the development ranks, triple my salary in less than 5 years, and reach the point in my career where companies are calling me for a job.
If you have no interest in how UX can make you stand out, thank you for taking the time to read this far! For everyone else — continue reading to discover
- What lead me down the path I’m on today
- How and why I learned about UX
- How you too can experience the success I have
The Devil in the Details
I started my career with an extremely small company (about 10 employees). Due to it’s size and lack of resources, both UI and UX design were de-prioritized to the point of non-existence.
Some time within the first few months of working for this company, I stumbled upon an article that contained several case studies performed by an independent research group.
It was eye-opening for me
Each of the case studies in the article showcased the profound effect that minor UX improvements had on conversion rates and ROI.
The article inspired me to devote some of my personal development time to learning UX so that I could improve the performance of the company’s landing pages.
Reviewing case studies is an excellent exercise — one that I still use today — to improve your UX chops. Check out the article below for some good ones.
A Path Paved by Titans
This research led to spending time browsing the web applications created by titans of tech like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. During this exercise, I began to notice the attention to detail given to all of the individual UI components on the page.
By inspecting each component in isolation, I could see how the careful consideration given to their UX not only made them simpler and easy to use, but helped to more clearly convey their intent.
When I would shift focus to the page as a whole, I could see how this resulted in a cohesive and more delightful user experience across the page and product.
The most successful companies are intentional about the use of color, spacing, animation, and typography — using these visual building blocks to
- Convey importance and priority
- Attract users’ attention
- Establish relationships and hierarchies between components on a page
- Evoke an emotional response
I studied the stylistic differences between different companies, and noticed that their UI and UX design was often a reflection of their brand and core values.
In studying the work of UX pioneers, two concepts became clear:
- Companies that embraced and emphasized the user experience were able to create a cohesive user experience across their website, marketing materials, and products
- Companies that ignore the user experience subjected users to a disjointed experience: one in which interactions and behaviors they learn in one product cannot be translated to another.
Google is my favorite example of a unified user experience. Their Material Design specification is the result of years of user research, and it has some fantastic UX patterns worth studying.
After a few months of study, I put my research to the test and surprised myself with the results that followed.
Using the skills I acquired, I was able to improve the average conversion rate of my company’s landing pages by over 70% (increased from 4.5% to 7.7%)! This led to a big bump in ROI for the company’s marketing efforts, and not long after — a nice bump in compensation for me.
I had learned how to manufacture tangible value
The Golden Opportunity
Many companies understand the importance of investing in design, but most fail to prioritize UX.
I think the reason for this is the simple fact that the difference between UI and UX design is often misunderstood, leading some to the misconception that they are one and the same. Of course — this couldn’t be more wrong.
A company’s lack of investment in UX design creates a golden opportunity
for employees in other roles (product people, designers, developers, etc.) to step up and fill that void.
A developer with a solid understanding of UX is in a unique position to fill that void, because he/she (should) know what is and isn’t possible on the platform a product is developing for.
If you aren’t already a student of the industry, I’d encourage you to become one. You should stay informed on the latest features of the language/platform you develop in. Like a good carpenter, a developer should understand what each tool in his/her tool belt is for and be able to quickly discern the right tool for each job.
A strong developer with UI/UX abilities is an unstoppable force — he/she is able to contribute to products in ways that his/her peers simply cannot.
Hunting for UX Design Deficiencies
I have worked with many product people and designers throughout my career, each with different skill levels and strengths — that experience taught me this:
If a team does not have a UX designer — sometimes, even when it does — it creates a void that you can exploit to increase your value just as I have.
Product people are usually pretty adept at creating solutions for things users gripe about, and many are skilled at taking abstract ideas and turning them into concrete product features.
I’ve found, though, that many of them fail to consider the effect that adding or changing a feature has on a product’s UX.
Conversely, I’ve found that designers often give a fair amount of thought and consideration to the UX of a feature they are designing.
They use color, spacing, animation, and typography deliberately to adhere to brand standards and clearly convey a feature’s intent to the user.
Most of the designers I’ve worked with are able to create nice looking designs, and many of them understand the importance of a cohesive look and feel across products.
An area they are commonly less skilled in, on the other hand, is having a deep understanding of what is possible on each platform — many don’t understand the technical differences between developing a mobile app and developing a web app.
I have also found that very few designers give thoughtful consideration to transitions between various UI states.
The key to learning how you can add value is by identifying the UX voids in your own company
You can do this by performing a personal UX review of each feature assigned to you — asking yourself things like
- What is the goal of this feature?
- Is it accomplishing that goal?
- Is it’s intent clear to the user?
- Are there any jarring interactions?
- If there are animations, do each of them have a distinct purpose? Or, are they simply design flourishes?
It takes time to develop this ability, but you should make it a routine to go through this process before you start developing any UI task. At first, you may just see if you can find flaws and write down ways that you think they could be improved.
Once you gain confidence in your ability to identify and solve UX issues, you are ready to start raising your findings with your product/design team.
This can be uncomfortable at first, as it’s common to feel as though you are stepping outside your realm of responsibility — you aren’t.
Be aware, some designers and product people may get defensive — it’s important that you tread lightly at first to get a good read on how each of your peers handles this type of feedback. Your goal is to be respectful and give constructive criticism that is beneficial to the team and product.
Onward and Upward!
In closing, it’s important to note that some companies (especially the titans in tech and many modern VC-backed tech startups) invest heavily into user research and UX design — in those companies there may be little room for you to add value in this area.
In my experience — most companies are extremely receptive and appreciative of developers that put careful thought and consideration into making a product’s UX better.
Your extra attention to detail will make stakeholders of the product view you as more invested in it’s success than your peers — this, in turn, increases the perceived value that you add to the team and company.
When you start leveraging the power of UX in your development career, you will start adding value in ways your peers can only dream of
The result? You too can rapidly climb the career ladder, double or even triple your income, and have companies calling you for a job.
