How Learning UX Made Me a Better Developer

Ever wondered what’s going on in your designer’s brain? Questions like: “Why is that there?” and “Is this little transition necessary?” often arise amongst developers. Lacking experience on the design end, programmers are generally left to implement these asks without knowledge behind their reasoning.

My curiosity on the subject drove me to endlessly badger the design team for answers. In an attempt to sharpen my skills (and provide the design team some much needed reprieve) I took matters into my own hands and completed a six month UX/UI design boot camp. It was an awesome experience and I want to highlight four ways I believe learning UX benefitted me as a programmer.

1. Improve design discussions

The agile process is based around the fact that design will almost always have to change once developers start implementing it. The discussions around those changes can either be fun and collaborative, or extremely painful.

Knowledge in UX/UI has helped me understand why designers want things a certain way, and offer solutions that satisfy both the design and development team. This knowledge also promotes a shared sense of scale on just how much time it takes to get a design right, and motivates me to implement those designs exactly as they are.

2. Better understand people and the brain

This one is beneficial beyond any career, and was my biggest motivator to learn UX. I always wondered about the “why?” in design. I learned that human emotion is a huge part of people’s experience with software. For example, a poorly placed error message can cause frustration or even feelings of incompetence in a user for their inability to use a simple app. Those negative emotions are then associated with the application.

When a designer places that error message correctly, users notice it and feel capable. Our peripheral vision draws our attention to motion and change, but only if it’s within a certain distance from our current focus point. Designers take this into consideration when creating a UI spec.

People’s physical and emotional needs play a huge part in UX design. Studying the subject increased my empathy for end users, designers, coworkers, and people in general.

3. Details really matter

As a developer it’s not uncommon to feel like some of the details in a design are only there to make you miserable. Spending 6 months in a design course helped me better understand why those details are there.

It’s easy to think that small things like micro-interactions are a waste of time, unnoticed by users, but that little animation may promote positive emotions in a user and help them associate good feelings with your app. Seeing first hand (through user testing) how impactful little things like animation can be on a user’s experience motivated me to bring every detail to life.

4. Appreciate user testing

I used to think that designing a component consisted of the designer creating something they thought looked nice, doing some quick user tests to make sure people don’t hate it, and then handing the design to us. I would wonder what on Earth was taking so long.

“Didn’t they just need to redo one component?” I quickly learned that user testing is extremely time consuming, but more importantly, extremely valuable. The designers that conduct solid user tests are the ones that will save us from future headaches.

I can’t tell you how many times I thought my designs were amazing, only to be humbled by user testing. There were several times when my users glossed right over what I needed them to click on. These tests resulted in pretty drastic design changes. As a developer I know I would have been happy to see that design change before I started implementing it.

Unfortunately for my designers, I’m probably not done bugging them. My newfound design knowledge has mostly made me realize how much I still don’t know, and how much more I want to learn. I hope this article sparks an interest in you to learn a little UX as well, but if not, I hope you better understand how much work goes into design and the importance of those little details.

• Megan Pekarek

  Software Engineer

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