How These Roles View Themselves and Each Other

If you ask a UX Designer and a UI Developer who is the principal designer of the user experience, expect to hear a resounding “I am!” from both of them.

As I’ve worked with and listened to UX Designers and UI Developers, I’ve noticed how they view themselves and each other. I am reminded of the crime shows on TV and who is the primary crime solver on each of them. You get a very different impression depending on which show you watch. The CSI shows would lead us to believe that the forensic scientists solve the crimes—including the arrest and interrogation of suspects. Quincy ME tried to convince us that it was the coroner. And patrol cops, detectives, profilers, prosecutors, and defense attorneys might emerge as the central crime solvers, depending on what show you watch.

In short, if you ask a UX Designer and a UI Developer who is the principal designer of the user experience, expect to hear a resounding I am! from both of them.

UX Designers see their validity as coming from the user research that informs their designs. “We’ve talked to the customers, and we know what they want.” UI Developers see their validity as coming from their knowledge of the underlying technology’s capabilities and constraints, along with their knowledge of how to use the widget library at their disposal.

And the tension between the people in these two roles has been known to generate hard feelings. UX Designers resent the disregard developers sometimes give their designs. And UI Developers feel that UX wireframes are too static and don’t take into account what they discover during the process of building a user interface. As a design comes to life, the developers gain new insights—either while interacting with the back-end processes or by testing the interactions they are building.

Another source of resentment that sometimes arises is UX Designers’ feeling that they’re getting left out of the development process as their wireframes move into production and would like to be more involved when changes are necessary. Conversely, UI Developers feel left out up front, where they feel they could provide informative inputs about what the available technology and tools can do and what they constrain.

Complementary Roles

The professional value UX Designers offer includes their processes and the artifacts they create that help inform and validate design and development around user needs.

I think the two roles have distinct areas in which they respectively add their unique value.

The professional value UX Designers offer includes their processes and the artifacts they create that help inform and validate design and development around user needs. When we create a wireframe or prototype, it’s our way of communicating data-driven—or at least process-driven—design considerations. Such a design artifact should be a straw man that starts a collaborative process of review and refinement. (Sometimes, being a UX Designer feels like being a forensic sketch artist who draws a nose, any nose, so a witness can say broader, thinner, whatever.) The best case is when a design deliverable both visually communicates data-driven requirements and provides a working space for collaborative input.

The professional value UI developers offer is their use of technology to actually make the best user experience happen. In that role, the UI Developer is a rightful participant in the design process. Bringing a conceptual design to life is a creative function, and a UI Developer can help the design mature and emerge by applying his or her own creativity to the process. If a UX Designer were to insist that his wireframes were unquestionable blueprints, we’d lose the insights that could come from a UI Developer’s craftsmanship in building that blueprint into a functional structure in which a user would want to work.

So, as UX professionals, our ultimate value is that we follow a process that includes data gathering, data validation, collaborative design, and usability testing of our designs. Our process can channel the talents of UI Developers and support their involvement in design by informing them of user needs, then validating that the emergent design meets those needs.

If we think of ourselves just as better UI Designers, we might lose the value proposition to talented UI Developers who can both design and code.