If engineers talk to users, do we still need designers?
At my current job at Facebook, I’ve been fortunate to work with engineers that do their job at the highest level and that understand the value of design. They do it to such an extent that they talk to users about once a week, and make changes based on user feedback.
That got me thinking, “What’s my role on this team? What’s the point of having designers at all?”. After weathering that brief existential crisis, I believe I have the answer to this question.
I don’t think the mainstream has fully understood how complex internet-connected software has become over the last decade. 20 years ago, when the world wide web began to grow in popularity, websites were very basic in their functionality.
They were so simple, that you often just needed one person to manage the whole site — the Webmaster. The Webmaster wrote HTML code, maintained the content, kept up with hosting and did all of the design.
