Developers “Own” The Code, So Shouldn’t Designers “Own” The Experience?
Now I know I’m being unfairly harsh about developers here and I don’t mean to be. There are some amazingly talented technologists out there who really care about usability and want to do the best for the user. However, it often feels as though there’s an asymmetric level of respect between disciplines due to a belief that design is easy and therefore something everybody can have an opinion on, while development is hard and only for the specially initiated. So while designers are encouraged (sometimes expected) to involve everybody in the design process, they often aren’t afforded the same luxury.
To be honest, I don’t blame them. After all, I know just enough development to be dangerous, so you’d be an idiot if you wanted my opinion on database structure and code performance (other than I largely think performance is a good thing). Then again I do know enough to tell when the developers are fudging things and it’s always fun to come back to them with a working prototype of something they said was impossible or take months to implement — but I digress.
The problem is, I think a lot of developers are in the same position about design — they just don’t realize it. So when they make a change to an interface element based on something they had heard at a conference a few years back, they may be lacking important context. Maybe this was something you’ve already tested and discounted because it performed poorly. Perhaps you chose this element over another for a specific reason, like accessibility? Or perhaps the developers opinions were just wrong, based on how they experience the web as superusers rather than an average Jo.
