Should Developers Design?
Instead of beating a dead horse, let’s remix it.
If you’ve transitioned from a traditional design career into digital design; you’ve likely wondered if should code. This is a huge topic in the design community, but not the software community. I’m going to ask: why aren’t we asking developers to design? And should they?
TLDR: Most of the time, yes.
Two Roads Diverging
Generally, when you start out your career, you’ll have a clear path of exactly what you want, when you want it, and how you’ll get it… Right? Yeah, no.
Most people’s first job is kind of just learning and doing what your employer says. Your experience may vary: but for most designers starting out at, you’ll make things in Photoshop/Sketch and ship them off to your boss. For developers, you’ll usually get tickets with designs on them; and then code them.
If you get lucky, you might collaborate with each-other. Some would actually prefer not too.
For designers, this process is detrimental. You are not responsible for the final quality of your product. You can spend hours designing things that are shipped off to another team, then released 6-months later completely different.
From a developer’s perspective, you could just code things that really aren’t well thought through; your product will always be at the mercy of the design and PM team. Like designers, you too are not responsible for the final quality of your product.
I see this all the time.
Designer ships their design that the developer implements; and it’s a complete mess. And… now it’s a culture issue: the designer is being kind of rude, and the developer is also being kind of lazy. The end product is mediocre and everyone is stressed.
This is why I think both sides should meet in the middle. Developers should design, and designers should develop.
Developers are bad at design, though.
First of all, you don’t need to open up Sketch and start making UIs. When I say developers should design, and designers should develop, I mean in order to make a great product; all teams, regardless of specialty, need to be responsible for the end product.
“Design” is not making things, it’s way of thinking about things. As a software professional you have amazing insight into how the thing you built works, and the easiest way to start making it better is to speak up.
For example, if you’re in a more traditional setting where you’re provided high-fidelity screens to code out: have a discussion with the designer about specific decisions they made and why.
If the task is “build out new feature” and you know for a fact there’s already a screen that does almost the same thing, does it make sense to re-use it? Design is moving into a more DRY approach with atomic systems, so I’m sure the designer would love to not have to redesign a feature that’s already been done.
In the end, the best way to build a strong product is to ensure everyone is used to their fullest potential. As a developer, you should be more than a coder; you should be a designer too. At least as much as you can (i.e. if you have no visual design skills and desire to learn them don’t do visual design).
So yes, assuming you’re working with a group of people on production-level software; developers should design.
