Chris Johnston

One of the things that I am passionate about is the need for applications to be both usable and aesthetically pleasing for the people using them. If your application does not meet these two requirements then, in my opinion, you have failed. This means that every development team needs UX people. Or as Michael Feathers’ puts it, “To put it more boldly: it’s not that development teams need UX people, it’s more like UX teams need developers.”

Michael Feathers has written a blog post relating software development to cooking. In it, he asks the question, “Where are the high-end restaurants of software development?” His answer is that they are in the smaller boutique development shops popping up around the world. The shops that adhere to the ideas behind the Software Craftsmanship movement.

In this article, he also states that in this day and age, UX is the defining aspect of developing applications and those teams that do not understand that developing software is all about the customer are doomed. I can’t agree more with this idea. The only thing that matters to a customer of your software is how easy and pleasing is it to use. We as developers can no longer have the attitude that we will create software and, well, the users will just have to learn how to use it. Everything we do needs to be customer and user centered.

Michael also puts forth the idea that as developers we need to learn how to do UX and be able to use those tools when called on. We don’t need to be experts in design or layout, but we should have a shallow understanding of the principles and how to apply them when sitting with a customer.

I want to take this one step further by saying that I think UX also has a responsibility to share their knowledge with developers and have them present during every stage of the UI development process. Just as it is wrong to have developers who know nothing about usability, it is just as wrong to have UX people who do everything in secret and then simply hand developers a design expecting them to implement it.

We need to tear down this curtain that exists between developers and UX and work needs to be done on both sides. One of the best projects I ever worked on involved developers working with designers and UX people creating wireframes and doing lo-fi prototyping with the users throughout the entire development process. Everyone on the team owned the success and failure of the application and in the end we created one of the best apps I have ever worked on. We were able to create an application that the users were excited to start using.

I have also worked on teams were the UX team showed up to standups in the morning and then handed designs to the developers. There were no discussions on whether something was implementable and there was no insight into where the designs came from. For all I know they outsourced the photoshop work to penguins in Antarctica. How can the team own the entire application if one part of it is created in isolation?

If you are passionate about creating software applications that can actually be used by people and passionate about the quality of those application then go read Michael Feathers’ article.