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.