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I think there's a fundamental shift in the type of web-skills which are now in demand, due to a number of factors. Here's some things which come to mind: - A "

I think there's a fundamental shift in the type of web-skills which are now in demand, due to a number of factors. Here's some things which come to mind: - A "web designer" or "web developer" used to be a generalist who wrote HTML, CSS, and some jQuery. Now there's a demand for specialization: a UI/UX designer who can prototype, iterate quickly, and use real data if possible, and a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards security, performance, reusability, and maintainability. - The need for the generalist web designer/developer seems supplanted by tools like Squarespace and Bootstrap, which make it easy to get acceptable results with fewer skills. It's the "commoditization of design". - The need for specialized designers/engineers is spurred by a realization that good design can command a premium/competitive advantage (and that good design means iterating quickly and having a deep understanding of what makes fundamentally good UI and UX), and that the front-end benefits from sound engineering practices as much as the back-end, especially if you're building SPAs or large-scale apps with complex UXes. - A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well.

eitally 11y ago
I agree 100%. What this also means is that, because of these micro-domain specializations, unless a founder has either a lot of time or a lot of money, what they end up building is (usually, if the market opportunity is in the multi-billions) an advanced functional prototype wealthier companies can look at as bellwether to judge the scalable profitability they could generate through acquisition. There's still enormous space for web-based SMBs, but that's not what most people think of when they think "startup."
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Pardon my ignorance. What's an SMB?
  - jdminhbg 11y ago
    Small/Medium Business, usually.
  - scolson 11y ago
    Small/Medium Business
  - krisdol 11y ago
    Super Mario Brothers
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rectang 11y ago
    A Samba mount.
    - gnarbarian 11y ago
      Funny to see this downvoted on "hacker news". I think this site is long over due for a title change.
  - aws_ls 11y ago
    So Many Bloated (apps)
c4n4rd 11y ago
"Questions such as when modals are appropriate" Can you point me to a document for this? Thank you.
- cvburgess 11y ago
  Here's one of many examples I found on the first page of Google. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/modal-windows-in-modern-web-design/#when-to-use-modal-windows https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/modal-windows-in-mo...
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  Perhaps start here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/overuse-of-overlays/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/overuse-of-overlays/ Then ux.stackexchange.com will undoubtedly have some useful pointers as well.... Although some tailored google searches will also help. Back in my UX-only days, I used NN Group a lot in supplementing my own A/B testing - it was a bittersweet relationship, as they provide a suite of analytics-based trackers on many of the websites I visit.
- epicureanideal 11y ago
  Read "The Humane Interface". The short answer is, almost never. Try to avoid them.
  - josephcooney 11y ago
    Agree. I figured the person asking the question was being amusing.
  - wmil 11y ago
    I am so glad to see someone write this. I've worked with too many designers who stack modals onto modals.
learc83 11y ago
>a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards security, performance, reusability, and maintainability. I've never head this referred to as a UI/UX engineer. You seem to have just described a web developer. If you're developing "large-scale apps" then you're definitely doing more than UI/UX, so why call it UI/UX engineering?
- joshuacc 11y ago
  At my company we call this role "UI Development." A UI developer is expected to be good at all aspects of development that are required to implement the user interface, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side templating languages. The JavaScript skills in question include the ability to write clean code, write unit tests and use client-side frameworks like Angular or React. Having an eye for design and usability is a plus, but not the focus.
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    Don't forget front end build pipelines and some server code to implement or retool APIs. Front end engineers need to know just about everything all the way back to the db
  - EC1 11y ago
    Actually you just described a front-end developer, which I guess you call "UI Development". Which is really a scam by companies to overwork one individual with two jobs. UI and actual development should remain separate as there is a seriously massive workload for each. These "full stack" roles only make sense extremely early on in the company or on a greenfield project, anything where iteration and field testing take priority by virtue of simplicity as a result of time.
- derefr 11y ago
  Think of it like this. Something like Gmail.com is really two things: 1. a frontend, which is a Single Page App, shipped as a blob of JS; 2. a backend, which is a big fat set of services in random languages. The people who create the frontend are traditionally thought of as web developers, but "UI/UX engineer" is perhaps closer: they're engineering a program, yes, but it's ultimately a program entirely to serve the purpose of being a nice UI/UX in front of an API. I think the most on-target name for this role would probably be "client-app developer." The client happens to be web-based, but that doesn't much matter. It's still a client that consumes your service.
amelius 11y ago
> I think there's a fundamental shift Yes, there's a shift. But could it also be that, at the same time, work is also drying up? You speak of frameworks. Until recently we needed engineers to build the functionality of those frameworks; these engineers are not needed there anymore, but is there sufficient work left elsewhere? That is the important question, imho.
- hellbanner 11y ago
  This is addressed on a larger scale by http://thelightsinthetunnel.com http://thelightsinthetunnel.com
- learc83 11y ago
  Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just get more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Indeed, it seems software is getting more and more specialized, with more and more programmers needed in smaller and smaller areas. I know a guy who makes a good living programming specialized mining tools. I didn't even know such a profession existed before meeting him.
    - amelius 11y ago
      Perhaps he meant data-mining? :)
    - brbsix 11y ago
      What kind of mining? For data, cryptocurrency, or ore?
- gaius 11y ago
  Keeping up with the frameworks is a full time job! Smart engineers don't bother. Find one you like and milk it for 5 years at least.
tootie 11y ago
Yeah, the middle is hollowing out. You can get a decent design for next to nothing with a WP template or SquareSpace and the cost of gettting something significantly better is to pay millions to a top-tier design agency. The middle ground is shrinking but the top and bottom seem to be growing stronger than ever.
- j_lev 11y ago
  Agree. Lots of money still being thrown at Drupal agencies.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    Drupal at least provides you with a fast prototyping experience. Data fields for everything, and connectors to all kinds of external services, validated in some cases by years of production grade usage. Caching, databases, clustering, high-availability... All solved and mature. The only thing you don't get for free with Drupal is a backend which you can speak to if you're deciding to go the SPA route later on. Which, in my personal opinion, is a pretty stupid trend anyway. SPAs tend to grow to Java Enterprise levels of complexity very very fast, and things break All. The. Time. Not to mention you're putting huge amounts of work to the frontend, where you virtually cannot account for cross-browser behavior, people with multiple-year-old browsers... and people with devices older than two years! Leave a Drupal project idle and unmaintained for a year, and you'll be able to pick up where you left it. Good luck doing the same with an AngularJS SPA - you might get away if you used npm shrinkwrap when you left, but the first npm update WILL kill your code with a billion possible places to fix. Drupal is mature, and maturity is something that the entire Javascript development and tooling community is missing unless you stick to plain jQuery. Stability and reliability IS a thing, especially in enterprise. Go the hipster way when your target audience is hipsters, go the proven, old-school way when your target audience is enterprise. edit: ad maturity of Drupal and support... D6 got released in 2008-Q1 and support ended in 2016-Q1. That's EIGHT YEARS of continuous support and security fixes, and I expect similar if not better support timeframes for D7. Good luck finding a Backbone.js or Ember.js (and maybe even AngularJS) developer in four years from now; not to mention that during the entire D6/7 lifetime backwards-compatibility-breaking changes were a rarity in Drupal when all of the mentioned JS frameworks have had more than their fair share of clusterfucks stemming from bad design. Or just the tooling environment, breaking changes everywhere and (gut feeling) every month there's a new tool to learn or best practices revamped. Wonder why PHP, server-side rendering and SQL is so prevalent? You can rely on buying a solution and having support and developers even in multiple years from now. Enterprise doesn't want ever-changing piles of crap layered in more piles of crap, enterprise wants stability and maintainability. And enterprise is where the money is, not some SV startup only surviving on VC or with 90% of its customers startups only surviving on VC.
sixtypoundhound 11y ago
You nailed it. A large fraction of the work effort which was traditionally branded as web-design has been repackaged into additional roles and/or automated and streamlined via tools. In reality, 60% of my time is spent on web design, but this effort is repackaged into two broader job descriptions: UX developer (requires heavy Javascript code) and web marketer (requires knowledge of analytics, SEO technique, conversion optimization, and a dozen other skills). Plus my frameworks pick up a lot of the lower level details of setting up and managing a web-page. Not seeing a shortage of work in those two spaces....
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Yeah. What is even web design these days? I consider myself pretty good at making a website look nice, but I don't design it in Photoshop.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    As with all design, it's not about making it look nice.
    - nchelluri 11y ago
      I think your post could do with some bullet points about what design is.
      - paulojreis 11y ago
        You're right. The process of making form follow function, maybe?
        odonnellryan 11y ago
        Definition of design: a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made. So, I guess "web designer" is very similar to "make it in Photoshop" and I should stop complaining ;)
hmans 11y ago
This is the correct answer.
ryanSrich 11y ago
> "A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well." Perhaps I'm taking this the wrong way, but the tasks you listed there don't even begin to scratch the surface of existing design problems a UI designer will face on a daily basis. EDIT: ex. Consider the design work that went into this product http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watsonpaths.shtml http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watso...
- mtrpcic 11y ago
  I think you two are saying the same things. The examples he provided are the problems that have already been solved, so you don't need teams of people to figure them out. Instead, you just need two pros who are excellent in specific areas, and "industry best practices" fills in the gaps. 10 years ago, there were no best practices, so this wasn't quite as possible.
- theoh 11y ago
  Looking at WatsonPaths, I'd say that it it's an "expert system" (very old idea) with one UX gimmick added, the path visualization of Watson's best guess at each stage. It's a totally appropriate application of that type of infographic, but IMO the insight that it could aid visualization to use it is a high level concept. I'd be curious to know whether the idea led to the WatsonPaths project, or if it was discovered in the course of an exploratory initiative (presumably with another name). What it definitely isn't is UX design "as usual". (That kind of diagram is not a new invention: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-chart-1 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-c... )
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- snegu 11y ago
everlost 11y ago
>A lot of the design problems have been solved already This is partly true. Design problems have been solved for isolated cases. You still require designers to choose the right combination of solutions that work for particular use cases. And in my experience, all too often those "solutions" start conflicting with each other, resulting in new design problems! Commoditization is definitely happening in design, but the design problems are not going away anytime soon. Disclaimer/plug: I work on Squarespace design templates - http://www.square-mart.com http://www.square-mart.com
galfarragem 11y ago
I just realised that all design markets behave in the same way: with maturity they shrink and most designers on that market _must_ adapt to survive. E.g. on a mature architectural design market, the need for design projects of small scale buildings almost vanishes. It's common that the design project is offered by developers trying to get the building contract. Only on large scale buildings still persiat the need for specialist design. In web design the same trends seem to apply: designers -> builders generalists -> specialists
junto 11y ago
For small companies it is simple enough these days to have someone install WordPress, buy a theme that looks pretty good for $18 USD and you're good to go. It might be a buggy insecure platform, but for non-tech savvy users it's brilliant. It doesn't make financial sense anymore to develop custom themes and designs from scratch. Large corps with their own branding is a different kettle of fish, but have fun trying to get on their preferred supplier list when you are a four person design agency. Developing a one off, responsive, standards compliant website, that lookd good too, is expensive and clients don't want to pay for it.
- busterarm 11y ago
  Mid-sized companies too. We have a large content team and use WordPress across our company (several dozen websites) because it gets the job done for that content team. Our sites are ultimately just landing pages for ads and feed into our sales team as leads. With our small 3-4 person devteam, we make our own themes and build into our WordPress sites all of the features that you'd want to host a site that's just content and a pipeline into our CRM (lots of handrolled plugins, custom functionality). We use modern ops practices (shoutouts to Pantheon for being a forward-looking PHP host) and write great code on a platform that's honestly not used to it. Some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. As our team grows and our tools get more robust, we may explore using Wordpress to generate static pages for better performance. We also use other tools (Laravel, Rails, Node) when it makes sense to. Seriously though with good ops practices and developers who aren't lazy running the show, Wordpress can be a fantastic platform. This is absolutely some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. WordPress runs 1/4 of the internet and not because 1/4 of the internet is cheap (though WordPress and PHP in general have fit that niche for a long time) - it's because training content authors to use custom/other tools costs money.
- toxican 11y ago
  I work in a small city in Maryland, so I'm not very concerned or familiar with the going ons in major cities. But for us at least, we've seen that when the companies go for the $18 WP theme, they usually come to us when they hit a point where they can't figure out how to expand the site and have us either step in or start over. Same with all of those shitty "build your own site" services. People will inevitably get frustrated with the limitations and want more, and that's when we step in. But then again, we don't have any shortage of people who want a fully custom/responsive website built from the ground up. And there's also a real sense of community here where a lot of small business owners would rather pay a local company to do it than pay out the ass for someone in DC/Baltimore to do it or deal with a faceless online service like Squarspace.
gnarbarian 11y ago
Some 'pure' design jobs may be drying up but there is plenty of work in the front-end developer space. When work becomes thin designers should focus on Sharpening their JS skills and they will find plenty of work. When someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer's skillset, not the industry trend. The following anecdote is from my perspective as a Sr. Programmer. I've worked with many great designers over the last 10 years and this is an example of my worst experience working with a 'pure' one. About 4 years ago I once worked with a designer who refused to break up a 60 meg psd file into separate elements I could use for buttons/background etc. I don't even have Photoshop. Her argument was she didn't know which layers/elements should be separated. She gave this to me the day before I had to have the site in prod. So I fired up gimp saw that it had 500 layers and just exported it to a jpg and used javascript imagemaps for the buttons just to get it out in time. This is after a week of work on another site they changed their mind on. I ultimately didn't get paid for any of my work and it was the last time I freelanced. Primadonnas who do not put in any effort into learning basic technical skills to maximize their effectiveness can take a hike. I've worked with great designers who were excited about the technical aspects of their craft. They understood that knowing what's possible makes them a better designer. Even when their graphic design degree did not provide them with any CSS training they quickly adapted because nobody has time to pass something back and forth moving elements around a few pixels at a time. I've seen more than one end up as great front end programmers and UX/UI designers. Even the ones who never quite got JS but embraced CSS were a great resource to have and made our sites look great. These are the kinds of people who make projects fun. If jobs for people who consider CSS "beneath them" are drying up I say good riddance. Nobody has time for the overhead entailed from having programmers move elements around back and forth a few pixels at a time to please the designer who can't be bothered to learn valuable skills of their own trade. The rule in technology has always been "Adapt or Perish" nobody bemoans the loss of COBOL jobs today for the same reasons people don't know what a "Printer's devil" is.
- zaphar 11y ago
  Nowhere in that article was there any indication that the web designers were people who considered CSS "beneath them". 4 years ago you had a bad experience and now you are projecting it onto an article that is only related due to the use of one word, "designer". The article was about a move to in-house design instead of agency/freelancer work.
kriro 11y ago
Pretty much spot on. The flip side of this is that web interfaces (and mobile) are squarely in the mainstream (shocker :P) which is good to know if you're a software engineer. The biggest indicator of this is mentioned in the article. Companies internalizing web design. I think there's plenty of work left in UI/UX but the "balance of power" with regards to base design has shifted towards software developers. I'm not very good at designing things and not too long ago I was almost ready to give up before getting started because I knew stuff would look ugly and I'd need a designer (wasn't easy to find good ones easily). These days you use bootstrap and a plethora of other tools and get pretty good results and then you can hire a designer to polish.
rwhitman 11y ago
The point about generalists no longer having a place in the market is something that's becoming more and more apparent every day. The web was crafted by generalists. People who could think about both technology and design at the same time were hugely valuable builders, and leveraged to rapidly build up the content and tools of web from nothing. Looking back, it was the wild west. We generalists were the rough and tumble pioneers that swung an axe and moved boulders, dug for gold, founded towns from dirt. But now, it's built. There's no more frontier left to explore. The roads are cleared, railroads built, the land claims are well established, the towns have paved streets and public services. 10 years ago we web generalists were calling ourselves designers or developers but now we're engineers, product consultants. There's no longer a mad scramble to get a vision onto the screen with a designer, develop a new product from nothing. It's all about engineering to remove the flaws of the rough work done by pioneers, carefully looking at what's been established and tuning it so that it lasts. I think some of us chronic generalists need to find a new frontier. This is just no longer our place..
- pbowyer 11y ago
  Simon Wardley puts it very well in his Pioneers / Settlers / Town Planners model: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-tow... If you spot that new frontier do share - it's what attracted me to the web.
  - thenomad 11y ago
    VR is my current top pic for a likely new frontier. It'll either bomb or it'll be huge, the equivalent of the introduction of the smartphone or greater.
    - swah 11y ago
      I wonder if it will isolate people even more? Everyone is always buried on their cellphones these days... Maybe people just accept to meet inside the Matrix... http://hypescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12719113_10102665120179591_3471165635858509622_o-838x558.jpg http://hypescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12719113_1...
estefan 11y ago
> A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such ... how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action That's what I thought too until I tried to get the homepage of a web site designed. I'm using a popular "run a design contest" site with a higher bracket prize to try to attract good designers. Unfortunately, some of the crap the designers are turning in should be embarrassing for anyone calling themselves a designer :-(
patrickdavey 11y ago
re " A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered." Do you have a book / resource / something where this information is distilled?

eitally 11y ago

I agree 100%. What this also means is that, because of these micro-domain specializations, unless a founder has either a lot of time or a lot of money, what they end up building is (usually, if the market opportunity is in the multi-billions) an advanced functional prototype wealthier companies can look at as bellwether to judge the scalable profitability they could generate through acquisition. There's still enormous space for web-based SMBs, but that's not what most people think of when they think "startup."

theseatoms 11y ago
Pardon my ignorance. What's an SMB?
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  Small/Medium Business, usually.
- scolson 11y ago
  Small/Medium Business
- krisdol 11y ago
  Super Mario Brothers
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rectang 11y ago
  A Samba mount.
  - gnarbarian 11y ago
    Funny to see this downvoted on "hacker news". I think this site is long over due for a title change.
- aws_ls 11y ago
  So Many Bloated (apps)

c4n4rd 11y ago

"Questions such as when modals are appropriate" Can you point me to a document for this? Thank you.

cvburgess 11y ago
Here's one of many examples I found on the first page of Google. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/modal-windows-in-modern-web-design/#when-to-use-modal-windows https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/modal-windows-in-mo...
FilterSweep 11y ago
Perhaps start here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/overuse-of-overlays/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/overuse-of-overlays/ Then ux.stackexchange.com will undoubtedly have some useful pointers as well.... Although some tailored google searches will also help. Back in my UX-only days, I used NN Group a lot in supplementing my own A/B testing - it was a bittersweet relationship, as they provide a suite of analytics-based trackers on many of the websites I visit.
epicureanideal 11y ago
Read "The Humane Interface". The short answer is, almost never. Try to avoid them.
- josephcooney 11y ago
  Agree. I figured the person asking the question was being amusing.
- wmil 11y ago
  I am so glad to see someone write this. I've worked with too many designers who stack modals onto modals.

learc83 11y ago

>a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards security, performance, reusability, and maintainability. I've never head this referred to as a UI/UX engineer. You seem to have just described a web developer. If you're developing "large-scale apps" then you're definitely doing more than UI/UX, so why call it UI/UX engineering?

joshuacc 11y ago
At my company we call this role "UI Development." A UI developer is expected to be good at all aspects of development that are required to implement the user interface, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side templating languages. The JavaScript skills in question include the ability to write clean code, write unit tests and use client-side frameworks like Angular or React. Having an eye for design and usability is a plus, but not the focus.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Don't forget front end build pipelines and some server code to implement or retool APIs. Front end engineers need to know just about everything all the way back to the db
- EC1 11y ago
  Actually you just described a front-end developer, which I guess you call "UI Development". Which is really a scam by companies to overwork one individual with two jobs. UI and actual development should remain separate as there is a seriously massive workload for each. These "full stack" roles only make sense extremely early on in the company or on a greenfield project, anything where iteration and field testing take priority by virtue of simplicity as a result of time.
derefr 11y ago
Think of it like this. Something like Gmail.com is really two things: 1. a frontend, which is a Single Page App, shipped as a blob of JS; 2. a backend, which is a big fat set of services in random languages. The people who create the frontend are traditionally thought of as web developers, but "UI/UX engineer" is perhaps closer: they're engineering a program, yes, but it's ultimately a program entirely to serve the purpose of being a nice UI/UX in front of an API. I think the most on-target name for this role would probably be "client-app developer." The client happens to be web-based, but that doesn't much matter. It's still a client that consumes your service.

amelius 11y ago

> I think there's a fundamental shift Yes, there's a shift. But could it also be that, at the same time, work is also drying up? You speak of frameworks. Until recently we needed engineers to build the functionality of those frameworks; these engineers are not needed there anymore, but is there sufficient work left elsewhere? That is the important question, imho.

hellbanner 11y ago
This is addressed on a larger scale by http://thelightsinthetunnel.com http://thelightsinthetunnel.com
learc83 11y ago
Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just get more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Indeed, it seems software is getting more and more specialized, with more and more programmers needed in smaller and smaller areas. I know a guy who makes a good living programming specialized mining tools. I didn't even know such a profession existed before meeting him.
  - amelius 11y ago
    Perhaps he meant data-mining? :)
  - brbsix 11y ago
    What kind of mining? For data, cryptocurrency, or ore?
gaius 11y ago
Keeping up with the frameworks is a full time job! Smart engineers don't bother. Find one you like and milk it for 5 years at least.

tootie 11y ago

Yeah, the middle is hollowing out. You can get a decent design for next to nothing with a WP template or SquareSpace and the cost of gettting something significantly better is to pay millions to a top-tier design agency. The middle ground is shrinking but the top and bottom seem to be growing stronger than ever.

j_lev 11y ago
Agree. Lots of money still being thrown at Drupal agencies.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  Drupal at least provides you with a fast prototyping experience. Data fields for everything, and connectors to all kinds of external services, validated in some cases by years of production grade usage. Caching, databases, clustering, high-availability... All solved and mature. The only thing you don't get for free with Drupal is a backend which you can speak to if you're deciding to go the SPA route later on. Which, in my personal opinion, is a pretty stupid trend anyway. SPAs tend to grow to Java Enterprise levels of complexity very very fast, and things break All. The. Time. Not to mention you're putting huge amounts of work to the frontend, where you virtually cannot account for cross-browser behavior, people with multiple-year-old browsers... and people with devices older than two years! Leave a Drupal project idle and unmaintained for a year, and you'll be able to pick up where you left it. Good luck doing the same with an AngularJS SPA - you might get away if you used npm shrinkwrap when you left, but the first npm update WILL kill your code with a billion possible places to fix. Drupal is mature, and maturity is something that the entire Javascript development and tooling community is missing unless you stick to plain jQuery. Stability and reliability IS a thing, especially in enterprise. Go the hipster way when your target audience is hipsters, go the proven, old-school way when your target audience is enterprise. edit: ad maturity of Drupal and support... D6 got released in 2008-Q1 and support ended in 2016-Q1. That's EIGHT YEARS of continuous support and security fixes, and I expect similar if not better support timeframes for D7. Good luck finding a Backbone.js or Ember.js (and maybe even AngularJS) developer in four years from now; not to mention that during the entire D6/7 lifetime backwards-compatibility-breaking changes were a rarity in Drupal when all of the mentioned JS frameworks have had more than their fair share of clusterfucks stemming from bad design. Or just the tooling environment, breaking changes everywhere and (gut feeling) every month there's a new tool to learn or best practices revamped. Wonder why PHP, server-side rendering and SQL is so prevalent? You can rely on buying a solution and having support and developers even in multiple years from now. Enterprise doesn't want ever-changing piles of crap layered in more piles of crap, enterprise wants stability and maintainability. And enterprise is where the money is, not some SV startup only surviving on VC or with 90% of its customers startups only surviving on VC.

sixtypoundhound 11y ago

You nailed it. A large fraction of the work effort which was traditionally branded as web-design has been repackaged into additional roles and/or automated and streamlined via tools. In reality, 60% of my time is spent on web design, but this effort is repackaged into two broader job descriptions: UX developer (requires heavy Javascript code) and web marketer (requires knowledge of analytics, SEO technique, conversion optimization, and a dozen other skills). Plus my frameworks pick up a lot of the lower level details of setting up and managing a web-page. Not seeing a shortage of work in those two spaces....

odonnellryan 11y ago
Yeah. What is even web design these days? I consider myself pretty good at making a website look nice, but I don't design it in Photoshop.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  As with all design, it's not about making it look nice.
  - nchelluri 11y ago
    I think your post could do with some bullet points about what design is.
    - paulojreis 11y ago
      You're right. The process of making form follow function, maybe?
      - odonnellryan 11y ago
        Definition of design: a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made. So, I guess "web designer" is very similar to "make it in Photoshop" and I should stop complaining ;)

hmans 11y ago

This is the correct answer.

ryanSrich 11y ago

> "A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well." Perhaps I'm taking this the wrong way, but the tasks you listed there don't even begin to scratch the surface of existing design problems a UI designer will face on a daily basis. EDIT: ex. Consider the design work that went into this product http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watsonpaths.shtml http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/watson/watso...

mtrpcic 11y ago
I think you two are saying the same things. The examples he provided are the problems that have already been solved, so you don't need teams of people to figure them out. Instead, you just need two pros who are excellent in specific areas, and "industry best practices" fills in the gaps. 10 years ago, there were no best practices, so this wasn't quite as possible.
theoh 11y ago
Looking at WatsonPaths, I'd say that it it's an "expert system" (very old idea) with one UX gimmick added, the path visualization of Watson's best guess at each stage. It's a totally appropriate application of that type of infographic, but IMO the insight that it could aid visualization to use it is a high level concept. I'd be curious to know whether the idea led to the WatsonPaths project, or if it was discovered in the course of an exploratory initiative (presumably with another name). What it definitely isn't is UX design "as usual". (That kind of diagram is not a new invention: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-chart-1 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-c... )
- deleted 11y ago
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snegu 11y ago

everlost 11y ago

>A lot of the design problems have been solved already This is partly true. Design problems have been solved for isolated cases. You still require designers to choose the right combination of solutions that work for particular use cases. And in my experience, all too often those "solutions" start conflicting with each other, resulting in new design problems! Commoditization is definitely happening in design, but the design problems are not going away anytime soon. Disclaimer/plug: I work on Squarespace design templates - http://www.square-mart.com http://www.square-mart.com

galfarragem 11y ago

I just realised that all design markets behave in the same way: with maturity they shrink and most designers on that market _must_ adapt to survive. E.g. on a mature architectural design market, the need for design projects of small scale buildings almost vanishes. It's common that the design project is offered by developers trying to get the building contract. Only on large scale buildings still persiat the need for specialist design. In web design the same trends seem to apply: designers -> builders generalists -> specialists

junto 11y ago

For small companies it is simple enough these days to have someone install WordPress, buy a theme that looks pretty good for $18 USD and you're good to go. It might be a buggy insecure platform, but for non-tech savvy users it's brilliant. It doesn't make financial sense anymore to develop custom themes and designs from scratch. Large corps with their own branding is a different kettle of fish, but have fun trying to get on their preferred supplier list when you are a four person design agency. Developing a one off, responsive, standards compliant website, that lookd good too, is expensive and clients don't want to pay for it.

busterarm 11y ago
Mid-sized companies too. We have a large content team and use WordPress across our company (several dozen websites) because it gets the job done for that content team. Our sites are ultimately just landing pages for ads and feed into our sales team as leads. With our small 3-4 person devteam, we make our own themes and build into our WordPress sites all of the features that you'd want to host a site that's just content and a pipeline into our CRM (lots of handrolled plugins, custom functionality). We use modern ops practices (shoutouts to Pantheon for being a forward-looking PHP host) and write great code on a platform that's honestly not used to it. Some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. As our team grows and our tools get more robust, we may explore using Wordpress to generate static pages for better performance. We also use other tools (Laravel, Rails, Node) when it makes sense to. Seriously though with good ops practices and developers who aren't lazy running the show, Wordpress can be a fantastic platform. This is absolutely some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. WordPress runs 1/4 of the internet and not because 1/4 of the internet is cheap (though WordPress and PHP in general have fit that niche for a long time) - it's because training content authors to use custom/other tools costs money.
toxican 11y ago
I work in a small city in Maryland, so I'm not very concerned or familiar with the going ons in major cities. But for us at least, we've seen that when the companies go for the $18 WP theme, they usually come to us when they hit a point where they can't figure out how to expand the site and have us either step in or start over. Same with all of those shitty "build your own site" services. People will inevitably get frustrated with the limitations and want more, and that's when we step in. But then again, we don't have any shortage of people who want a fully custom/responsive website built from the ground up. And there's also a real sense of community here where a lot of small business owners would rather pay a local company to do it than pay out the ass for someone in DC/Baltimore to do it or deal with a faceless online service like Squarspace.

gnarbarian 11y ago

Some 'pure' design jobs may be drying up but there is plenty of work in the front-end developer space. When work becomes thin designers should focus on Sharpening their JS skills and they will find plenty of work. When someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer's skillset, not the industry trend. The following anecdote is from my perspective as a Sr. Programmer. I've worked with many great designers over the last 10 years and this is an example of my worst experience working with a 'pure' one. About 4 years ago I once worked with a designer who refused to break up a 60 meg psd file into separate elements I could use for buttons/background etc. I don't even have Photoshop. Her argument was she didn't know which layers/elements should be separated. She gave this to me the day before I had to have the site in prod. So I fired up gimp saw that it had 500 layers and just exported it to a jpg and used javascript imagemaps for the buttons just to get it out in time. This is after a week of work on another site they changed their mind on. I ultimately didn't get paid for any of my work and it was the last time I freelanced. Primadonnas who do not put in any effort into learning basic technical skills to maximize their effectiveness can take a hike. I've worked with great designers who were excited about the technical aspects of their craft. They understood that knowing what's possible makes them a better designer. Even when their graphic design degree did not provide them with any CSS training they quickly adapted because nobody has time to pass something back and forth moving elements around a few pixels at a time. I've seen more than one end up as great front end programmers and UX/UI designers. Even the ones who never quite got JS but embraced CSS were a great resource to have and made our sites look great. These are the kinds of people who make projects fun. If jobs for people who consider CSS "beneath them" are drying up I say good riddance. Nobody has time for the overhead entailed from having programmers move elements around back and forth a few pixels at a time to please the designer who can't be bothered to learn valuable skills of their own trade. The rule in technology has always been "Adapt or Perish" nobody bemoans the loss of COBOL jobs today for the same reasons people don't know what a "Printer's devil" is.

zaphar 11y ago
Nowhere in that article was there any indication that the web designers were people who considered CSS "beneath them". 4 years ago you had a bad experience and now you are projecting it onto an article that is only related due to the use of one word, "designer". The article was about a move to in-house design instead of agency/freelancer work.

kriro 11y ago

Pretty much spot on. The flip side of this is that web interfaces (and mobile) are squarely in the mainstream (shocker :P) which is good to know if you're a software engineer. The biggest indicator of this is mentioned in the article. Companies internalizing web design. I think there's plenty of work left in UI/UX but the "balance of power" with regards to base design has shifted towards software developers. I'm not very good at designing things and not too long ago I was almost ready to give up before getting started because I knew stuff would look ugly and I'd need a designer (wasn't easy to find good ones easily). These days you use bootstrap and a plethora of other tools and get pretty good results and then you can hire a designer to polish.

rwhitman 11y ago

The point about generalists no longer having a place in the market is something that's becoming more and more apparent every day. The web was crafted by generalists. People who could think about both technology and design at the same time were hugely valuable builders, and leveraged to rapidly build up the content and tools of web from nothing. Looking back, it was the wild west. We generalists were the rough and tumble pioneers that swung an axe and moved boulders, dug for gold, founded towns from dirt. But now, it's built. There's no more frontier left to explore. The roads are cleared, railroads built, the land claims are well established, the towns have paved streets and public services. 10 years ago we web generalists were calling ourselves designers or developers but now we're engineers, product consultants. There's no longer a mad scramble to get a vision onto the screen with a designer, develop a new product from nothing. It's all about engineering to remove the flaws of the rough work done by pioneers, carefully looking at what's been established and tuning it so that it lasts. I think some of us chronic generalists need to find a new frontier. This is just no longer our place..

pbowyer 11y ago
Simon Wardley puts it very well in his Pioneers / Settlers / Town Planners model: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-tow... If you spot that new frontier do share - it's what attracted me to the web.
- thenomad 11y ago
  VR is my current top pic for a likely new frontier. It'll either bomb or it'll be huge, the equivalent of the introduction of the smartphone or greater.
  - swah 11y ago
    I wonder if it will isolate people even more? Everyone is always buried on their cellphones these days... Maybe people just accept to meet inside the Matrix... http://hypescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12719113_10102665120179591_3471165635858509622_o-838x558.jpg http://hypescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12719113_1...

estefan 11y ago

> A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such ... how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action That's what I thought too until I tried to get the homepage of a web site designed. I'm using a popular "run a design contest" site with a higher bracket prize to try to attract good designers. Unfortunately, some of the crap the designers are turning in should be embarrassing for anyone calling themselves a designer :-(

patrickdavey 11y ago

re " A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered." Do you have a book / resource / something where this information is distilled?