Reasons Why Software Developers Need to Understand UX Design
Essentially, User experience (UX) design is the process design for teams to create products, which offers meaningful and relevant experiences to users. Furthermore, as a software developer, you will have varying degrees of impact on a user experience of the product in practice because you must make some significant decisions over how you implement a specific component’s software. As a result, these design decisions will make some considerable impacts on user experience. This essay aims to consider some reasons why software developers need to understand UX Design principles.
Introduction and Overview
Basically, creating an experience is not about the how a product is built. It is not about how it was developed, what frameworks were implemented, or whether you utilize advanced technology. In contrast, it is about how the product helps people to accomplish their tasks, and to achieve their goals. Most importantly, it represents that how users feel when they use and engage with the product in practice. When people use a product, they usually assess their experiences according to the following parameters:
- Value: Does this product give me value?
2. Function: Does this product work?
3. Usability: Is it easy to use?
4. General impression: Is it pleasant to use?
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service — from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
— Don Norman (The inventor of the term “User Experience”)
In general, User Experience(UX) would be an extremely difficult issue to define. In fact, User Experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. In addition, UX is almost always followed by the word “design”. In fact, UX design is the process of creating products that are practical and usable. To be more specific, User experience (UX) design is the process design for teams to create products, which offers meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This requires the design of the whole process of acquiring and integrating the product by considering some aspects, such as branding, design, usability and function. Even though usability and user interface (UI) design are significant areas of UX design, they are subsets of it. This means UX design is a broader concept.
Eventually, the best user interface in the world will not compensate the experience of a slow and ineffective system, which does not deliver to the real needs of the user. Depending on what type of software developer you are, whether you work on back-end side that no user ever interacts directly with, or if you work directly on the interfaces as a front-end developer that your users will interact with, or, if you develop mobile apps, you will have varying degrees of impact on a user experience of the product in reality. In other words, each component of a system plays an important role for the overall user experience. Also, as a developer, you must make some decisions over how you implement a specific component’s software. Therefore, these design decisions will make some considerable impacts on user experience.
For instance, as a database developer, if we suppose a database with a few million records in the background, as well as being on the front-end, we have a search box that allows users to search the complete set of records for a keyword in a special column. An ineffective query on the database could lead to the back-end side to a halt and create a negative experience for users because of having to wait for an excessive amount of time for what should be a simple set of results from their point of view. Obviously, enhancing the efficiency of the query, which allows wide ranges of records to be searched immediately by the user. As a result, you can have a more effective system with superior user experience.
This essay will discuss some main reasons for understanding UX design as a software developer.
Making the complex issues simple
Simplicity could be considered as one of the basic principles of UX design; however, it would be a difficult concept to define. Generally, Simplicity could refer to a clean design, the complexity of the experience, or even the required coding. In short, simplicity is a high goal of design. Simplicity is also the absence of complexity. Complexity is often understood to mean something that is hard to understand, but it can also be defined as something with many interconnected elements.
The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.
The simplicity of a thing can only be measured in comparison to something more complex
Besides, diminishing the complexity of code could be a useful approach for software developers. This process can affect on creating something more efficient and easier to maintain. Notwithstanding the fact that it decreases technical matters, it helps other developers gain a better code comprehension.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Thus, for developers who understand the UX design principles, this process would be much easier because the work we are already doing revolves around making things easier for the end user. Then, the final product will probably be successful when adopted by the developers who have a ultimate task or goal that the product helps users to fulfill their needs simply.
Ultimately, cognitive load is a term that refers to the amount of effort being used in the working memory of an individual. By reducing the number of items that a user has to think about when trying to complete a task, developers can be able to diminish the cognitive load for an individual by following UX design best-practices. This means offering less choice enables the user to make decisions and move through a process more efficiently and rapidly.
Enhancing your communication skill
It is clear the role of a developer has never been simple or easy task. The continuous evolution in terms of best practice, newer and better frameworks appearing all of the time, and all this is moving at a remarkable pace of changing. Nevertheless, there is a vast ocean of information in the form of online courses, technical essays, tutorials to cover any special development topic to improve your developing skills. Now, the question is how to improve the non-technical skills, like communication skills? Although there are a number of resources across the internet, they are much harder to learn and apply in this way since there are not tangible results. The reason is that the improvement of your soft skill, particularly communication skills, can just only really be improved through experience.
Moreover, communication is a key factor in UX design. So, understanding UX designs by developers can convey product ideas, explain thoughts behind designs, and work with other teams more easily and productively.
Finally, if you work as a developer in an Agile team, you might be familiar with the concept of pair programming. Fundamentally, two developers will work together at the same workstation. This means there are two roles in this scenario: the ‘driver’ writes the code; whereas, the ‘observer’ reviews the code as it is written. Currently, by adapting this approach and replacing one of the developers with the designer, we can be able to create a designer-developer pairing that allows both roles to be in a continuous communication with each other. After performing this work in this way, both the developer and the designer gain an extensive insight into the many aspects of each other’s roles. The availability of each other to ask questions, and to have answers freely supported without fear of being made to feel inferior, creates one of the most productive partnerships.
Focusing on the user
The UX is exceedingly important in software development as it makes sure that you will deliver a solution that is relevant to the user, and it solves a problem or meets a specific need. Basically, a UX designer should tackle the user experience process with performing various tasks, such as user research, creating personas, designing wireframes and interactive prototypes as well as testing designs. Even though these tasks could be different from one organization to another, they always keep the users’ needs at the center of all design and development efforts.
“People ignore design that ignores people.”
— Frank Chimero.
As a developer, you should take into consider the interactions with your customer during each of these tasks — before, during, and after they use your products. As an example, you can consider how easy it is to purchase and register with your app. Knowing the user journey throughout your software will help you set some limits on the intended use of the system and even predict errors and exceptions. Furthermore, when software development teams build software with the UX in mind, they decrease the chances of rework and redesign. So, this can help designing and developing teams to consider user needs from day one. By bringing user experience design into the SDLC process, development teams can utilize those expectations to inform each aspect of the software project.
In conclusion
As a developer, you will have varying degrees of impact on a user experience of the product in practice because you must make some important decisions over how you implement a special component’s software. As a result, these design decisions will make some considerable impacts on user experience. This essay considered some reasons to explain why software developers need to understand UX Design.
