User Perception Developers
Stepping beyond UX and visuals.
In talking with a friend the other day it became very apparent there is not a very good term for a specialization of front-end developers that focus on creating and iterating on a design instead of just executing on a locked down design specs. The need for a good term is to better be able to find developers with this focus in their skill set and to improve best practices and learnings from others. Just like “designer” could be UX or visual, “engineers” could be 3D graphics or database specialists, front-end developers have their own specializations. Some of the terms commonly used are UI developers or mobile developers or design technologist or prototype developers. None of those terms are all very accurate at the value that these developers provide to the product development cycle. In a project life cycle sometimes there are developers who’s primary value and skill set is at discovering how the user will perceive the product and creating solutions to improve and mold this perception. This specialization is a User Perception Developer.
UX designers and visual designer do a very good at predicting how a user will react but they will never be perfect. The role of a user perception developer is a creative role who takes the UX and visual designs to code the actual product. It’s not until after you have something tangible with live data that it can be properly evaluated to find the weakness and strengths to improve the product. Misunderstandings for the user can happen in the multiple area of the execution: layout, visuals, application hierarchy, data presentation, animation queues, navigation structure, gestures or interaction patterns and in UX that breaks standard conventions in a user’s mental model of how something should work. One of the the harder issues that’s becoming more prevalent is with issue presenting information that’s not contextually appropriate or contextually inaccurate. A lot of these contexts does not fall inside the standard visual layout of an app. It’s in the form of notifications on the phone or connected devices (smart watches) or even real world objects (the internet of things). These are all factors in the user’s perception.
A user perception developer primarily writes code to create the actual product. They will then will look at short coming and benefits of a design and iterate on possible solutions. Once they have some solutions implemented they work with designers, engineers and beta suers to refine the overall perception of the experience. User perception developers lead this part of the process just like visual and UX designers lead their part. These developers are focused on building out concepts quickly and iterating while keeping the code close to production ready. Sometimes this could mean making a one-off prototype but more often that not they are invested and involved in making the final product.
R/GA is an example of a company that does an awesome job at this type of iterating during development and connecting all the different disciplines to create better products faster. Unlike the “traditional” design/development process, there is no point where the creative exploration is done. PSDs don’t get kicked over to the black hole of engineering only to appear weeks later. This is discovery and iteration embedded in the development process. Sometimes code will be refactored or tuned for performance before releasing to the end user but the development process is always close to the final product.
The process start with taking a single goal for a user, structuring it and aligning it with the other goals inside the application, building a live working version to evaluate, discovering the weaknesses and iterating to come out with a better solution faster. With the speed that products and services are evolving the skills of a user perception developer are being more important to create products better and get them to market faster.
