Why Software Engineers Could Benefit from Taking a UX Design Course
As an engineer, I’m at least 2 steps removed from the end-users of my work. I rarely interact directly with customers or listen to their problems and what they want.
As an engineer, I also rarely stop to think about what makes a good design and why good design is important. As long as the app works and does its job, why should design matter?
After all, in our line of work, if a piece of code doesn’t work as expected, it’s the engineer’s problem to figure out why. It’s our job to work around constraints and find creative ways to tackle performance and legacy code while minimizing cost and technical debt.
Applied to product, shouldn’t it be the user’s job to figure out how the application works? If a workflow is a bit confusing, so what? They’re smart enough to figure it out and deal with it, right?
All of these forces combined led to one of my biggest blind spots — a lack of appreciation for good UX.
It wasn’t until I asked friends to test out a side project that I realized how important good design is.
Watching friends struggle to understand a sentence, how to interact with a component, or where to find a piece of information was a big reality check.
