When a developer starts designing
Last year after completing my undergrad in information technology, I came to Philadelphia to pursue a masters in user experience design. Coming here I realized that almost all my classmates were from a design background, having been graphic designers, visual designers or even architects. So I was the only developer in the class, which made me a bit skeptical about my decision of learning UX design.
In our first semester, we had to pick up an existing website, redesign and then develop the redesigned site. Since I had developed websites before, I knew limitations of my skills and that of the programming languages. So keeping all that in mind I starting developing wire-frames, followed by visual designs for the website.
My designs weren’t bad as such, but compared to those of my classmates, they lacked the ‘wow’ factor. I found out that they followed a different approach altogether. Having no knowledge of how designs are implemented, unlike me they didn’t worry about the next step of the process, which was development.
My designs did go under a lot of changes through a number of iterations, along with a round of user testing, but still I kept playing safe, always thinking about the implementation stage at the back of my mind and thus not going for anything flamboyant.
On the other hand, my classmates designed with much more freedom, coming up with various extravagant elements which though had a great visual appeal, were near impossible to implement. But they didn’t care about the implementation part(as most designers do), they just wanted their designs to look as visually appealing and enticing as possible.
But as I mentioned before we didn’t just had to design the site, we also had to implement it. And the difference in our approaches just didn’t end at their design being much more challenging to develop, but it also resulted in their sites being in a need of a lot more time to develop.
Having developed websites before, I had kept the layout of my website almost constant throughout the entire site, so though our sites had more or less the same number of pages, for me, after developing the initial template page, I just have to change the contents to create all the other pages. Whereas, for them, each page had a unique structure, forcing them to code each page from scratch and ultimately compromising on their designs to meet the deadline.
But, this was like a special case, where a single individual was given the task of both design and development of the system, unlike in the industry where there are not just different individuals, but different teams assigned to do these two tasks. And though they’ve to sync up at some stage, most designers make the designs with complete freedom, without sparing much thought to how the implementation of their designs is gonna happen.
So, as a UX design student, does the knowledge of development help? Well, it has it’s pros and cons. The disadvantages include that, it greatly restricts the freedom with which I design, resulting in me creating designs which are functional, but not out-of-the-box great.
But on the other hand, having an idea of how the various elements are gonna be implemented, there are very few or no compromises made on the designs during the development phase. And also, having kept the development in mind while creating the designs, the designs take much less efforts and time to code. Both of which can be crucial for time sensitive projects.
Thus I don’t exactly recommend designers to gain a knowledge of the development process, but for someone who already has it, I feel it can be both advantageous or disadvantageous depending on how and how much of it is applied to the designing phase.
