Is this the trivialisation of two professions?
For the last 18 months my Twitter feed has been continuously tainted by an ongoing argument; designers must code.
One particular tweet, managed to trivialise the design and engineering professions in no more than 121 characters:
“Designers need to code. There’s no excuse anymore. If you can’t implement your own work, how do you expect to control it?”
- Someone I no longer follow on Twitter
This argument has now spread much further than my social feed and is potentially playing a part in my future career options. When looking for a new challenge a few months ago, nearly every job description I read for a UX, UI, Visual or Interaction Designer had coding listed as a requirement. My understanding since, is that people actually just want a designer that understands the capabilities of coding; naturally enhancing their ability to design something useful and with realistic expectations. The issue with merely listing ‘HTML/CSS’ as a requirement, is that you could be losing out on the opportunity to hire someone who can add value in other ways.
“When we consider candidates merely by skills, we may be ruling out great design-thinkers who may be lighter on technical skills but gifted with brainstorming and collaboration.”
- Libby Bawcombe, Senior Product Designer at NPR
For every designer currently out there dedicating 3 days a week to code tutorials, there’ll be another dedicating that time enhancing their own craft. So who is to say which is more important?
The best thing to happen in the industry over the last few years, is the need and encouragement for collaboration. It’s how we create the best solutions and it prevents us from getting blindsided by our own individual views. By defining the strategy, researching the audience, crafting a product people actually want to use and ensuring a scalable solution is built, every team member has their own valuable role to play. This isn’t a one person job.
Having been privileged enough to work alongside some fantastic developers, I know that I don’t need to be able to code to have control over my designs; not to mention the fact that they’re not actually ‘my’ designs, they’re the culmination of desk research, UX thinking and UI implementation from an entire team.
Is a UX Designer job advert listing ‘HTML/CSS' as a requirement, expecting the same amount of knowledge as an engineer who has a degree in the field and has coded every day since? Are they expecting them to build a platform that can be scalable and work on a clients 10 year old version of IE? What exactly is it that you want that UX Designer to do?
I agree that employers should definitely consider the benefits of having someone with a broader set of skills. It’s critical as a designer to have some level of skill in other disciplines, as it helps us empathise with our teammates and make the overall process as seamless as possible. But with such high-fidelity prototyping tools coming to the market now, such as Framer, Pixate and Invision just to name a few, the gap between design and development is rapidly closing.
Talking on the prototyping panel during last year’s Google Span, Invision’s Clark Valberg shared their viewpoint on the subject and how they’re trying to tackle the issue.
“Part of our philosophy about design and coding and how those two things intercept, is that we’d like to make a tool that would free and liberate designers from thinking about code as much as possible.”
- Clark Valberg of Invision
As well as utilising the prototyping tools available, designers should just try verbally communicating with engineers (they’re real people!) and as a team, ensure implementation requirements are understood throughout.
The need for T-shaped, cross-disciplined designers is definitely there but identifying which disciplines are the most necessary is the biggest challenge. Referring back to the original tweet that brought on this post, designers should never expect to ‘control’ a collaborative design.
“The greatest products in the world are built with the synthesis of domain expertise, strategic understanding and the strategy of implementation coming together as one.”
- Clark Valberg of Invision
Better work comes from collaboration, not from isolation.
I’m a Product Designer, with a background in delivering solutions across multiple platforms from ideation to launch. Currently based in Amsterdam and forming part of the team at MOBGEN — Part of Accenture Interactive.
Hopefully you found this post interesting! You can say Hello on Twitter, or feel free to troll me for being another designer stating the obvious…
