Large Heydon ColliderMost of the time, I get hired to fix things as a consultant developer that would not be broken if they had been designed more thoughtfully in the first place. Sound familiar? But here's the thing: I'm not a developer. I studied art and design at university, including how to design websites. But they didn't teach me how to code, even though that's most of the work. So, in early employment, I had to ""steal company time"" to learn how to do that and be better at my job, as a designer.
Recently, I've taken on design work that lets me work in code. One involved the ""redesign"" of a website. Being in this position allows me to improve the performance and accessibility of a website to an extent that is completely out of reach of a developer, who inherits *prior art*. And this is despite the fact that performance and accessibility are seen as responsibilities of *developers*.
The perennial question is, "should designers learn to code?" I think a better question is, "why are we taking design away from those who did learn to code?" Why are we imprisoning them in Jira where they're doomed to fix all the tiny problems designers who can't code--and coders who can't design--should never have been put in a position to make?
Adrian Egger@heydon I’m with you, brother
Ben Delarre@heydon the other question is "why do designers pay so little attention to accessibility?".
I see this so so often it's alarming. Accessibility is rarely part of the design thinking. Even at the design system level the accessibility surface of a control is rarely specified adequately. But at the application level, seriously, I don't think I've ever seen a single thought put into accessibility at the product level design stage.
Ben Buchanan@heydon I can't fit my extended thoughts into a toot but here's one I prepared earlier https://conffab.com/presentation/things-designers-and-devs-should-know/
Monospace Mentor@heydon Interesting! This sounds to me very much like the schism between developers and operations people that the DevOps movement was going to mend.
Julik Tarkhanov
DevWouterMy answer would be "due to specialization" that has gone to the wrong. Being a generalist that can code and design is in my opinion a more healthier option.
@DevWouter It's not really about being a generalist, in my opinion. It's about having the right skills for the medium.
I agree, my remark was more in "a generalist is more suitable if a specialist doesn't have all the required skills" 🤣
Tim Johnsen
Dawn Ahukanna@heydon
> Should designers learn what or how to code? Maybe. They should be paired with developer “buddy” if they don’t.
It’s important for experience designers to understand & intimately know the medium of expression. For software products, that is code. It’s what is used to express the intended experience & for the implementation to exactly match your vision blueprint, U need to be able to specify & architect the experience, informing software specialists building it.
James Scholes@heydon > Being in this position allows me to improve the performance and accessibility of a website to an extent that is completely out of reach of a developer, who inherits *prior art*.
I'm intrigued, but don't know what you mean by this.
@jscholes Let's just talk about accessibility for simplicity: Someone says to me, "can you make this carousel accessible?" And the answer is usually no, not this one, it's fucked. It's extremely difficult or impossible to make good of the component. As a designer, I would have the authority to remove the carousel altogether and put a completely different pattern in place. Or, as a designer who can code, I could devise a carousel-like alternative that is, in fact, accessible BY DESIGN.
Eric Eggert
Florens Verschelde@yatil @heydon @jscholes The opposition to factoring in accessibility and performance from some designers always felt strange to me. Can you imagine an industrial designer saying “who cares if our design choices double the production costs and lead to brittle products and massive recalls? this is our design vision”? (Or, sure, look at Musk and the Cybertruck if you don’t want a hypothetical.)
Thomas Michael Semmler@heydon @jscholes That is interesting. I have made the opposite experience, actually. I have specifically designed with accessibility in mind and I was told that I "had the potential to do really good, but I think too much like a developer."
Or also, as a designer, people do accept my position as expertise. Whatever is produced by *Design* is subject to everyone's opinion because everyone *has eyes*.
Whether or not Designers get to have the power you describe depends on the organisation.
digitalCalibrator (she/her)
az@heydon as someone who sits closer to the developer side of things I always feel sad when I don't get to have conversations early on with someone doing design. The web is a material just like wood or plastic and has properties and characteristics that if ignored in the design process will have unfortunate outcomes.