A Developer in UX Designer’s Clothing
What I learned after taking at trip to one of the largest UX Conferences in Southeast Asia
In the (arguably) many years I’ve been developing applications, I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing my customers’ expressions using the application I’ve built a handful of times. And of those handful, it has typically been to report an issue with the application. It is then that I stop thinking about the “pleasure” of seeing their expressions, and then sink back into the developer’s corner. I rummage through the automated tests and figure out what went wrong. I continue spiralling until I either fix the issue, or I need to get home.
It’s probably not uncommon for creators to wonder how their creation is doing in the hands of the people they built it for. Is it doing okay? Is it amazing them? Is it helping them achieve their dreams and so much more?
But for most developers in the enterprise, the answer is probably going to be tucked away deep in the quarterly financial reports of their organization (or however frequently your company likes to gloat). And so I’ve always felt this disconnect between the creator, the creation, and the customer. You’re developing inside a walled garden, outside the busy and boisterous world of your customer. This makes it hard to understand the how’s and why’s of what you’re doing.
To remedy this disconnect, I took it upon myself to find different ways to help broaden my horizon. I wanted to contextualize the “User”. I didn’t want them to just be another object in the database that would have a pre-assigned given and family name. So, the first thing I set my sights on was attending UX Conferences. As the subtitle makes clear, I took a day trip to one of the largest, if not the largest, UX Conference in Southeast Asia. I’ve been to others, but they didn’t have such high profile personalities such as Paolo Malabuyo, Director of UX at Google, or Eleanor Harding, Product Manager at Twitter. Let me then escort you from the introduction to my key takeaways from the conference.
Three Key Takeaways from UX+ Conference 2019
Now, as much as I’d like to talk at length about every thing they discussed (particularly the panel which was all sorts of engaging), I can’t distill all that into one article. Instead, I’ve condensed it into three key points that I think would be valuable for people that are still trying to figure out how developers can slowly consider UX and design in their work. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive “how-to” but a slight nudge in the right direction.
A Little Goes A Long Way
I’ve often caught other people, and myself, suggesting that sweating the small decisions aren’t worth the time. We have bigger things to build, we say. Shipping is the most important thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a patch job right now. We’re agile, we’ll make that piece of code prettier down the line (spoiler alert, we’ll forget about it until the new guy / gal at work asks us why we thought this was a good idea). And of course, that’s not necessarily wrong (a lot of times it is, but I empathize). As it turns out, even without a design degree under your belt, your decisions as a developer can influence your product in a good (or bad) way.
One wonderful example of a small thing done right was from Benjamin Hersh. He’s at Dropbox now, but he was talking about how Medium’s “Pardon the Interruption” message for asking people to sign in or sign up got raves from the online community for being wonderfully polite. Something, Benjamin says, is rare online.
So you might be wondering, how does being polite on the internet help me, a developer, be better at design? First, you’ll make more friends being nice. The second answer lies in the error messages you write that, in smaller or less caring organizations, don’t matter too much. You’ve probably written an error message like “Username is invalid”, “Password is invalid”, “The database encountered an error”, or “You are not a user”. As a developer trying to be better a design, you can start here.
Design is more than just the pretty colors. It’s about creating an experience that your customer will enjoy. And knowing how to fix an error is something that will reduce your customer’s stress, and will make your product look well put together. If you can start making the error messages that spring up in your application more clear and concise, then you’re on your way to delivering a better product for your customer. You don’t even have to open Sketch or Figma for that.
And please, don’t ever let any variation of the words “Uncaught system exception…” seep out of your application. It’s a dishonor to you, a dishonor to your family, and a dishonor to your cow.
Building Solutions that Help Quantify Good Design
Another thing we’ve all heard thrown around once or twice is that design is something we can only see and feel. We’ll know good design when we see it. You’ll just feel it in your jellies. So as a developer who knows little about good design, you’re thinking you’ll hardly ever make an impact on the quality of the design of your application.
But that’s not true at all. Design is as much a process as development is. There’s a lot of research that needs to be done to get it out the door. And as the engineer designing and building the application, you can help with that. You can help by integrating tools that will help your team better understand how your features are being used by the customer (with the appropriate privacy considerations in place, of course. Don’t forget, it’s 2019). Help your team track what workflows are the most common and most important for your customers. Help them see what operations do they do over and over again and where they spend most of their time in. Making your product work better for your users is vital. You’ll want to do a little bit of research to understand what metrics matter though.
There are limitations to this, of course. Jay Demetillo, the Lead UX Designer at Grab, had to go to the streets of their target market with his team to better understand the context of their customers when they were redesigning Grab Food. But the process of obtaining usage metrics of your application safely and securely cannot be understated. He even makes it a point in one of his slides that you need to track data on the features you release. It may not give you all the answers, but it helps point you in the right direction.
Design was in you all along
The last thing isn’t really a “thing” you do, but a mindset you need to have. It was unanimously agreed upon by the speakers in some way, shape, or form, that design is not some title that needs to be handed out. There’s no sorting hat that will say you belong to the house of “design”. In some organizations, you’ll have to take it upon yourself to promote the culture of prioritizing good user experience. And you shouldn’t think the only way to do that is by creating wireframes, or building mockups. As Paolo Malabuyo put it, you need to show up. Show up at those meetings that need this discussion. Don’t wait for someone to offer you the proverbial “seat at the table”. And one of the things that he (Paolo) says that I feel should resonate with everyone, is that at the end of the day, your goal as a team is to solve your customers’ problems. And I think that should be motivation enough to fixate on the user experience when we build our products.
But if you find that it all feels cumbersome, and difficult, and challenging to do, Eleanor Harding, Product Manager at Twitter, has a story just for that:
There were three vinegar tasters who were presented with a vat of vineger. They were tasked to appraise its quality. Each, with their own ladle, take a sip of the vinegar. The first one cringes at the sour taste. The second, similarly, takes a sip and has a similar reaction. The last one, to the surprise of the other two, smiles upon taking his sip. The two inquire as to how he can smile despite the sour taste. “The vinegar is sour”, he says. “And that is precisely why it makes me happy, for it is exactly as I expect it to be”.
You can learn more about the event at the UX+ Conference website. The story of the vinegar tasters will be different from how it was delivered because it was re-written from memory.
