What The Heck Is A UX Engineer?
First of all I should introduce myself — I am a User Experience (UX) Engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming in Leeds, England. I’m assisting in developing a design system and write frontend code for the various projects covered under the SB&G’s Gaming umbrella, which in turn ends up on the web. I work closely with UX designers, but am not a designer as such in this role, despite the connotations “UX” brings with it. This seems to be a common presumption when mentioning my title, but in fairness we are constantly defining our responsibilities as we go along, this role, and subject, appears to be very much of the moment.
Design? Engineering? Where do we draw the line?
There’s a lot of discussion around should designers code? and should developers design?
I think, when working to deliver products and experiences on the web at least, the answers to these could quite possibly be “yes, it would help” and “yes, it would help”, respectively. If you’re interested in what happens with your creations beyond your role — as an idea goes from designer to developer to user (to grossly simplify the process).
But I’ve got enough on my plate…
There is the issue of both disciplines having plenty of breadth and depth, so you can’t expect all designers and engineers to cover their counterpart too. You’d have too many unicorns running around for a start!
I wouldn’t argue for everyone to become some sort of designer/developer hybrid — especially when being a CSS developer could be a full-time role in itself — but at least a little foray into each wouldn’t hurt (much). A designer would benefit from knowing what constraints apply to the web, what data they’ve got to play with, and an engineer would do well to understand design principles to help deliver impactful, beautiful and highly usable interfaces and applications.
Everyone benefits from a little more understanding of each other’s perspective.
Enter the UX Engineer
Hopefully this all paints a picture of why this role has appeared. The desire to bridge design and engineering calls for people who can plug the gap in between, and overlap a little into each of the fields. The UX Engineer isn’t there to replace either a designer or developer, but simply to aid the dialogue between the two to deliver the best product possible.
These are relatively early days, but as a collective we have found that to work effectively we tend to cover the front of the frontend, addressing performance and UX in our output — Brad Frost described this very well when he wrote about Frontend Designers.
In our day-to-day we cover a broad range of tasks that can take an idea from conception all the way to deployment. Amongst other things we;
- Participate in ideation sessions to shape campaigns and user flows.
- Advise designers and stakeholders on feasibility and/or technical constraints, or even new opportunities on the web.
- Create proof of concepts - this can be done locally or using various online tools (Codepen and Glitch are great places to start), whatever works.
- Build components and systems, taking into consideration accessibility and performance.
- Help implement frontend code, where UX may be impacted by adding/changing/removing features.
This is part of what a UX Engineer currently does where we are, in another place there could be quite different responsibilities involved.
It’s fluid.
It’s just the right mix of design, UX and engineering to smooth the process for all involved.
