Learning design has made me a better developer
Overtime, I’ve come to define my personal mission to be supporting people in their own mission. Becoming a developer got me to love building productivity tools, and I’m now decently good at it. I’ve been meeting my purpose with Internal Tools for more than 2 years at Algolia, crafting digital experiences on-demand to help other teams automating recurring manual actions and information pipelines, so they can focus more on what they do best. But code, to me, was never an end in itself, and design always has been continuously growing more and more fascinating to me.
6 months ago my manager enrolled me in a tailor-made design apprenticeship, where I would join part-time the Product Design members to learn UX and quickly apply these skills to profit our squad efforts. This chance, along with being a refreshing back-to-school experience and raising back my motivation when I was a bit down, helped me become better at making interfaces and fulfilling my mission.
Here are my key takeaways of this apprenticeship:
Designers are facilitators
I’ve often overheard people talking about designers as problem-solvers or please-make-it-look-good resources, but what better qualifies their role is “facilitators”. They ensure all stakeholders of the project are aligned on needs, resources, and solutions. And they do it by digging into the different elements to identify the root problem to solve, before even starting to think about how to solve it. They’re responsible for bringing all possible solutions together to evaluate them, prioritize them and finally make them happen.
Context is key
For a business to flourish, their service has to sell, and to sell, it ought to bring value, and to be usable, and hopefully even enjoyable. But more importantly, to sell, the product has to exist. Designers constantly balance user needs and business needs with the available resources (time, money, people, skills) to find the most optimal solution in that very specific context. Designers’ role isn’t to put final solutions down on the table, but instead best possible solutions at a given time with given resources, and push them live. A company’s context is constantly evolving, and in that sense, designing tech products is a never-ending iterative process.
Design is a process more than art
Artistic creativity is essential in Branding Design, but in Product Design, usability rules, tests and methodology prevail. We basically are assembling a puzzle, what we need is knowledge, observation, and iterations.
- Knowledge because usability has everything to do with how human brain works: patterns. We’d better learn about them not to reinvent them every time.
- Observation because some patterns are yet to be discovered, or simply don’t apply to our context. Listening to people and observing their acts and their physical and psychological states when using our product are simply essential to evaluate the pertinence of our solutions.
- Iterations define the design process (design › ship › get input › make changes/design › …), taking into account the external inputs of the users and stakeholders is simply essential because only real usage can validate your work.
If you fall short on creative power or simply don’t have the resources, don’t give up on UX. Even small steps to improve consistency and accessibility, and respect common patterns will greatly increase your product’s usability. In that case, consider using an existing design system, existing illustrations, existing icons, and search for some UX best practices about what you’re working on (forms, modals, navigation, search, empty states…).
When you’re feeling stuck, it most certainly has nothing to do with creativity, it’s either your scope is too wide, or your context poorly defined, or your knowledge limited on that end. Just go get more materials discussing with people, or looking at other designers’ work.
Draft early, present early
Quickly sketching user flows, layouts, information architecture or whatever you’re working on will help you get the ideas out of your mind, structure them, take a step back, see what works and what doesn’t, and more importantly, share early and often with your colleagues—designers as well as other roles. They’ll have a fresh evaluation, and based on their own experiences, they’ll come up with constraints, critiques or alternatives that will open your mind in either iterating over or validating the solution. When presenting, make sure you always explain the context and clearly state what kind of feedback you’re looking for.
Even if you’re not skilled in a specific field, discuss with these people, because if you get 5% of what they’re trying to say to you, your design will benefit a ton from it. That brings me to the next point.
Designers aren’t right
Humility is a core element of being able to design solutions. We’re in a constant investigation, we’re not here to be right, we’re here to listen, and to assemble the pieces. We work for the users, with the users. Being right doesn’t mean anything before we ship. Our sole mission is to analyse, then suggest. Suggest what we think is a good experience for the task at hand. Our users will testify what is right and what isn’t. Putting emotion in what we craft is vital for it to be fulfilling, but knowing when to let go is equally essential for it to be impactful.
Everything is design
I mean Everything. Yep, even coding requires design skills, that we often use without noticing. Design thinking helps in identifying the root issue of what we’re trying to solve, consider alternatives, listen to user needs, and find an optimal solution taking the whole context into account. This applies to everything in our lives: which database architecture is required for this project? Which navigation pattern will I use for this section? What process should I put in place for my team to collaborate more? How to start writing that article? Which phone should I offer to my mom?
Learning a few things about how designers work would actually help anyone being better at finding solutions for their own task, whatever it ends up being.
Internal Tools squad doesn’t have a dedicated Product Designer, and yet user experience is a core element of what we do. Learning design has provided our team with more autonomy while making our interfaces and processes stronger. On the personal side, it’s a great asset as it both empowers and entitles me to take relevant interfaces decisions that I can implement on-the-go, accelerating processes and overall quality.
What made that move possible is the trust the team has in my abilities to learn and give back with even more impact in my role. Algolia values employees’ personal growth and through its culture, enables chances like the one I’ve been given. Sometimes developers are happy covering more of the project, and supporting them in doing so, even if presumably out of scope, could really become a win-win situation where the time-to-delivery shrinks in a good productive way.
Thanks a lot to all the Product Design team members of Algolia for their very generous and constant support along with their warm welcome. They’ve made by far the greatest contribution to all that learning. And here’s list of all the other resources that have been part of my apprenticeship:
- Introduction to UX: Fundamentals of Usability
Marieke McCloskey on Skillshare - UX Design Fundamentals: Everything You Need to Know (and More)
Joe Natoli on Skillshare - Interaction Design for Usability
William Hudson on Interaction-Design.org - Don’t Make Me Think
Steve Krug (book) - Emotional Design
Don Norman (book) - The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman (book) - 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
Susan M. Weinschenk (book)
