As the person largely responsible for the implementation of the current design, let me put it this way: you did notice that one of those positions is for a designer, right?
Yeah - I actually had "UX designer" as a separate role, but decided to leave it out and focus on the more technical / hard deliverable side, since there would also be an argument for including Product Managers, Customer Happiness, Sales, Investors, etc. (ideally all of these roles impact what is built)
What you're talking about goes well beyond the formal role of "designer". Consider, for example, what happens if you sign up with one of the many outsourced design firms. They won't do most of that. The good ones might do some user research. But that's not guaranteed; what they all promise to do is produce a very pretty document with a bunch photoshop mockups. Which an implementation team is expected to execute as written.
I definitely think developers should be active participants in all that work you describe. (I sure am.) Which is exactly why I encourage people not to have a formal "designer" role. If there's somebody who's officially responsible for X, then everybody else isn't. Design is a pervasive concern.
Yep! Actually thats me! Theres quite a difference between about having "a designer" and a product focused UI/UX person though. Luckily for me, im the latter group, and I share the product manager role as well as rally with the engineering team. its actually a fun role since i sit on both sides of the fence.
People are getting stuck on the word "designer." The point isn't that all designers need to be involved in implementation but that the scope of front end _web_ development has grown so wide that it makes sense to split the responsibility between "front of the frontend" and "back of the frontend."
I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.
I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.
At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.
Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.
Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.
Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.
I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.
There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.
I'm that way too, nor am I a designer. My point was just that if you have one of the best UX designers working on something then the point is probably to have him/her optimize for functionality and design... otherwise it would have been fine to have someone work on it who was only skilled at the engineering aspect of the project.
UX is becoming more differentiated, more different UX roles and positions will occur:
UX Researcher - is already there
IA Architect - will be more common
UX Analyst - is collecting and interpreting data from Keboola-like tools (or "Hadoop-based" tools collecting data about user base), providing additional data to UX researcher
"Prototyper" - coder responsible for technical clarity of coded prototypes and their preparedness to be inherited into production
UX designer - responsible for synthesizing data from research and applying them into the product/service in proper context; preferably a people-person, as he/she connects all other sides
I used to think that a front-end developer implemented a designers designs. Has that changed? I'm noticing more and more job descriptions lumping the two together.
To me it's seem he put more than one "job" under the designer bucket.
To me, an integrator (HTML / front-end JS) an art director, a usubility expert are different roles. Can you find somebody that do all this ? Of course, but if you just hire a "designer" without being more specific about your needs, you will end up in a situation like this.
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