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Developers “Own” The Code, So Shouldn’t Designers “Own” The Experience?

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We’ve all been there. You spent months gathering business requirements, working out complex user journeys, crafting precision interface elements and testing them on a representative sample of users, only to see a final product that bears little resemblance to the desired experience. Maybe you should have been more forceful and insisted on an agile approach, despite your belief that the organization wasn’t ready? Perhaps you should have done a better job with your pattern portfolios, ensuring that the developers used your modular code library rather than creating five different variations of a carousel. Or, maybe you even should’ve sat next the the development team every day, making sure what you designed actually came to pass.

We’ve all been there. You spent months gathering business requirements, working out complex user journeys, crafting precision interface elements and testing them on a representative sample of users, only to see a final product that bears little resemblance to the desired experience.

Maybe you should have been more forceful and insisted on an agile approach, despite your belief that the organization wasn’t ready? Perhaps you should have done a better job with your pattern portfolios, ensuring that the developers used your modular code library rather than creating five different variations of a carousel. Or, maybe you even should’ve sat next to the development team every day, making sure what you designed actually came to pass.

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Instead you’re left with a jumble of UI elements, with all the subtlety stripped out. Couldn’t they see that you worked for days getting the transitions just right, only for them to drop in a default animation library? And where on earth did that extra check-out step come from. I bet marketing threw that in at the last minute. You knew integration was going to be hard and compromises would need to be made, but we’re supposed to be making the users lives easier here, not the tech team.

When many people are involved in a project, it is very important to make sure that they have a common understanding of the problem and its solution. (Image credit: The Next Web)

Of course, there are loads of good reasons why the site is this way. Different teams with varying levels of skill working on different parts of the project, a bunch of last-minute changes shortening the development cycle, and a whole host of technical challenges. Still, why couldn’t the development team come and ask for your advice on their UI changes? You don’t mess with their code, so why do they have to change your designs around? Especially when the business impact could be huge! You’re only round the corner and would have been happy to help if they had just asked.

While the above story may be fictional, it’s a sentiment I hear from all corners of the design world, whether in-house or agency side. A carefully crafted experienced ruined by a heavy-handed development team.

This experience reminds me of a news story I saw on a US local news channel several years ago. A county fair was running an endurance competition where the last person remaining with their hand on a pickup truck won the prize. I often think that design is like a massive game of “touch the truck”, with the development team always walking away with the keys at the end of the contest. Like the last word in an argument, the final person to come in contact with the site holds all the power and can dictate how it works or what it looks like. Especially if they claim that the particular target experience isn’t “technically possible”, which is often shorthand for “really difficult”, “I can’t be bothered doing it that way” or “I think there’s a better way of doing it so am going to pull the dev card”.

Now I know I’m being unfairly harsh about developers here and I don’t mean to be. There are some amazingly talented technologists out there who really care about usability and want to do the best for the user. However, it often feels as though there’s an asymmetric level of respect between disciplines due to a belief that design is easy and therefore something everybody can have an opinion on, while development is hard and only for the specially initiated. So while designers are encouraged (sometimes expected) to involve everybody in the design process, they often aren’t afforded the same luxury.

To be honest, I don’t blame them. After all, I know just enough development to be dangerous, so you’d be an idiot if you wanted my opinion on database structure and code performance (other than I largely think performance is a good thing). Then again I do know enough to tell when the developers are fudging things and it’s always fun to come back to them with a working prototype of something they said was impossible or take months to implement — but I digress.

The problem is, I think a lot of developers are in the same position about design — they just don’t realize it. So when they make a change to an interface element based on something they had heard at a conference a few years back, they may be lacking important context. Maybe this was something you’ve already tested and discounted because it performed poorly. Perhaps you chose this element over another for a specific reason, like accessibility? Or perhaps the developers opinions were just wrong, based on how they experience the web as superusers rather than an average Jo.

Now let’s get something straight here. I’m not saying that developers shouldn’t show an interest in design or input into the design process. I’m a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and think that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. There are also a lot of talented people out there who span a multitude of disciplines. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and I don’t think it should be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”.

So, if good designers respect the skill and experience great developers bring to the table, how about a little parity? If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”?

Everybody has an opinion. However, it's not a good enough reason to just dive in and start making changes. Image credit: Open Source Way

Doing this is fairly simple. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re not sure why something was designed in a particular way, and think it could be done better, don’t just dive in and start making changes. Similarly, if you hit a technical roadblock and think it would make your lives easier to design something a different way, go talk to your designer. They may be absolutely fine with your suggested changes, or they may want to go away and think about some other ways of solving the same problem.

After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.