10 ms·

I feel like 20 years ago I was empowered at places I worked to add features or menu options or even entire screens that made sense. Lately everything is designe

I feel like 20 years ago I was empowered at places I worked to add features or menu options or even entire screens that made sense. Lately everything is designed by some UX person and it has to look exactly like that. I am guessing even early twitter had engineers that dictated how things worked or looked and I'm guessing now they pay millions of dollars for each 20x20 pixel area of the screen.

Kranar 5y ago
Many "UX persons" are engineers or computer scientists, and having a good working relationship with them and seeing them as equals goes a long way to allowing you to provide your own insight and give suggestions and feedback.
- hpoe 5y ago
  I envy you if that is your experience. Almost all UX persons I have worked with have a degree in "Design" and are artsy type that tell me. "You can't make this blue it just doesn't vibe with the green we have." Many of who use the argument "Apple/Google does it this way" I'm not saying your now right it's just been my experience that they aren't engineers or Computer Scientists.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I've seen what happens when computer scientists go off on their own and design a user-centric product. Trust me, its good to have an 'artsy type'. I worked on a project with some pretty 'famous' CS guys (obviously relative to the field) and their form of documentation were essentially quizzes for the users to work through. Practically an end of term exam. It was crazy.
- carlmr 5y ago
  The problem is not necessarily their incompetence, but that they're given the exclusive right to dictate every detail of the UX. The problem is that they often don't know the constraints of the system you're working with, something that only comes with actually working on the implementation. E.g. I was working on a display. The graphics were designed by a UX Team. However the display only had 256 colors, had to be readable outside, had a 320x240 resolution. They had designed everything as vector graphics with highest color settings on really good Eizo monitors. The customer thought the designs look cool, and I wasn't given any freedom in improving them. I tried discussing the constraints with them, but because they were "on top" they wouldn't listen. In the end the customer saw the prototype and said it looked terrible. But I had all the communication with the UX Team and them that I wasn't allowed to make it work for this display. In the end it cost everyone an extra month and a lot of frustration to arrive at basically what I suggested when I first checked the hardware. The problem isn't to learn about UX, it's that you have a "UX person" that may not know about UX and dictates the terms.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    That sounds discouraging. But you can apply the same story about any manager-like figure, no? If one's priority is design freedom or whatever, a good working relationship with your higher ups is the best chance to enable that. Working well with managers is also a good strat for becoming one yourself, and having more influence over things you care about.
    - carlmr 5y ago
      >you can apply the same story about any manager-like figure, no? True, the problem is more when companies become more and more top-heavy over time. These intermediate layers are created. With every layer it becomes less likely that the people that can actually decide won't ever hear valuable feedback until it's too late. >Working well with managers is also a good strat for becoming one yourself, and having more influence over things you care about. In the end I showed them what had to be done to make it look decent on this kind of display. Because all layers of management were in the room, they managed to decide to do these changes. It's just a very inefficient way to get to this point.
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    That very painful example sounds like a bad setup where clear technical constraints weren’t taken in to account. People not listening come in all forms. UX, dev, MBA.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    > necessarily their incompetence, but that they're given the exclusive right to dictate every detail of the UX. Unless you have valid reason to think the user would prefer your way, this sounds like the correct chain of command for a strong product.
    - varjag 5y ago
      …aand we're back to waterfall
      - 5y ago
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Most of the ones I have ever encountered are former graphic design people.
  - ratww 5y ago
    For me it is 100% former graphic design people. In fact I've seen several engineers trying to migrate to UX but the gatekeeping and prejudice made them give up.
- eplanit 5y ago
  I've worked with many, and none have ever had a bona fide engineering or comp. sci. background, except for a few who didn't cut it in the ranks of developers, and so redirected themselves or were shunted off to UI (now "UX" to make it sound cool) -- they've all been visual artist types. I find it best to get high-level (graphics, the css, color schemes) design ideas from them, and then leave it to the engineers for implementation, who might tweak/adjust/remove some items in order to balance with performance, usability, and sanity. If, instead, UX is given "authori-tie" then it becomes ridiculous, fast.
- chii 5y ago
  the problem happens when they aren't your equal, but the workplace is too politically correct for you to bluntly point it out. All you can do is suggest improvements, if at all.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    When I'm working with a colleague who has a specialty, I don't generally concern myself with whether they're "my equal" but rather, whether they bring something constructive to the table, in their specialty. I find "graphic designers" to be enormously helpful in solving problems related to user interaction and judgment with regard to use of color, typeface, and effective use of limited screen real-estate. There are good ones and bad ones. The key is to assess where they are, and learn how to communicate with them with regards to any technical impacts. The last thing I'd want to do in collaborating with a team-mate is summarily judge them as "my inferior". But that's (unfortunately) just me.
    - chii 5y ago
      > summarily judge them as "my inferior" most organizations that tend to have office politics and are very politically-correct in their behaviour tends to end up with people in roles calling shots, despite those shots not being great. graphics designers is just one example of this that i've seen, where a poor UI or bad UX is mocked up, but because you're an engineer, you do not get to have much input or your input is regarded as irrelevant (because your role is to code, not do UX design). That's what i mean by the "inferior" comment - that the UX/UI designer isn't as good at their craft as you are in implementing code.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  I have worked at over a dozen companies of various scales and never once met a "UX Person" that was an engineer or a computer scientist, let alone have any formal education or experience with human-computer interaction. They were glorified web designers at best, and them dreaming up ridiculous features with no technical know-how, ultimately leading to "compromises" (aka. massive amounts of technical debt) was the #1 contributor to lack of morale and engineer churn at every single one.
- bjornsing 5y ago
  Eh? When one person dictates every aspect of the end result to another person there’s definitely some inequality there, but doesn’t it run in the opposite direction to the one you imply?
- ratww 5y ago
  The thing is that the "seeing as equals" has to cut both ways. UX people, UI designers and PO/PMs who see developers purely as interface xerox machines don't really deserve much respect.
- hsn915 5y ago
  This comment is condescending and disrespectful. 1) I've never met a UX person who is a programmer. Most of them are from graphic design background, sometimes for vouchers or magazines and they don't necessarily understand that the computer screen is not the same kind of medium as a piece of paper. 2) Having a professional relationship entails pushing back and questioning. Being a "yes man" to the UX people is not a good working relationship. The implication of your comment is in order to push back and provide feedback I must first acknowledge my subservience to their whims and only once they approve of my work I may humbly submit some suggestions for their kind consideration.
MattGaiser 5y ago
One of the things that really surprised me working as a software engineer was how much my work would be judged how how well it matched the drawing. It often seems like there is more verification of that than whether it does what was intended.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  But... for most of the reviewers/team, what was intended is that the result look like the drawing. That's it. "Here's a mockup - we spent a lot of time on this". "OK... what does it look like on tablet, mobile, what are the failure states, what should error handling look like?" "We spent a lot of time on this - make it look like the mockup". Had a project years ago that was... almost as bad as that sounds.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I worked on a project where the buy button was off the screen on anything but a wide monitor. So I could not see it on my laptop.
- jollybean 5y ago
  It's an easy thing to inspect for, and, most UX designers have pixel perfect expectations, which is actually not unreasonable in most cases as every pixel generally does have it's place. The problem of course is that it's too easy to focus on pixel perfection at the cost of other things. Recently, I've worked on a project and we had to force ourselves to 'not care' about those things until the very end when we did clean up.
  - legulere 5y ago
    But aren’t projects where you don’t have time to work in the details not also projects where the next project is waiting around the corner?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I'd be totally fine with UX designers having final authority on these matters if more of them were actually good at UX design. It seems that UX these days just means making interfaces that match some arbitrary opinion of "beautiful" without any actual regard to what works and doesn't for a user interface. I miss when actual UX designers did actual studies to find actually good ways to put interfaces together.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Well-put. Thanks for noticing — I hope to be on a project of yours soon.
- pm90 5y ago
  I believe that most trained UI/UX designers (ie those who have internalized that UX is supposed to help people and not just how fancy or standard conformant you can get) do build pretty great designs, but I’ve noticed a lot of ego in this area from design leaders in my personal experience. Nearly every time design becomes political and every change needs to be conformant to even the most minute standards even if they may not have any material effects on the product. I think the field just has a lot of shitty “leaders”, most of the “grunts” I’ve worked with have been incredibly helpful and willing to think out of the box to make UX easier.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Death by 1000 cuts. "Is this component really that shitty for the user?" is how you end up with...hell, insert any Enterprise software here.
- swiley 5y ago
  I'd completely disagree. Software engineers tend to be very pragmatic. Perhaps it's really due to the involvement of the community but you look at open source software that has no "UX person" and it tends to be miles ahead of closed software that has them.
  - p0nce 5y ago
madeofpalk 5y ago
Oof this kind of adversarial us vs them doesn't sound great! In well functioning product teams everyone should be working together to make a better product, recognising the roles and strengths of each other. If this isn't the case, then your org has bigger problems.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  >everyone should be working together to make a better product That's rarely the top priority for everyone on the team at the same time. Design folks want to 'design', and agreeing that 'feature X' doesn't need to be in the screens - even if it's "the better product", doesn't align with their career need to have showcase material for the next job interview. Similar with tech/dev folks - an update feature might just need simple poll mechanism, but that doesn't give them experience with building a full pub/sub scalable architecture platform, or testing out the newest messaging libraries. The more people on that team, the more conflicting priorities there will be.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    > In well functioning product teams This doesn't sound like a great team, and doesn't really align with my (sure, admittedly limited) experience. I've only really worked once with someone who had strongly personally motivations that worked against the teams goal, and it was recognised that they were a wanker.
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      the notion of "a better product" is... way too amorphous. without a lot of definition and constraints, people can make solid arguments for 'the good of the project' which also align with their personal goals (new tech, more design, etc) and it's often very hard to argue against those, because they sound good aren't necessarily 'wrong'.
- ElViajero 5y ago
  > If this isn't the case, then your org has bigger problems. That is completely true. To work together to build a product, to have everybody understanding what is what needs to be achieved, and collaboration in general is the way to go. In organizations where business does not trust engineering, engineering does not trust design ... things are never going to work. It is a collaborative effort, one point of view is insufficient to create an attractive product in a cost-effective way that is not full of tech-debt.
sam0x17 5y ago
This is true. One way to combat it I've found (as a CTO) is to ensure backend engineers are involved in the initial pre-mockup conversations and mockup iteration conversations and to give them just as much vetoing power as someone from bizdev. In some orgs this is impossible but it works great for us. I also find that backend people tend to have extremely good ideas when it comes to UX (better, even, than a lot of UX people), they just don't enjoy or aren't good at executing these ideas (or aren't allowed to). The takeaway is to take your backend engineers' opinions seriously and let them touch the frontend when they want to.
brightball 5y ago
I'm a big fan of prototyping functionality with no UX input at all, so that the engineers have full authority to look at all the moving parts and figure out the best way to make them work...without any design constraints. At the point we have a functional prototype, go through it with UX so they can understand all of the pieces before they do the design. Sometimes it leads to minor improvements on what the engineers already came up with. Other times it leads to an overhaul. But as long as all of the core functionality is built first, iterating on the design will just be moving a few things around.
carlgreene 5y ago
This is because the UI/UX of a 2021 website/app is far more involved and complicated than that of a 2001 website/app. Product cohesion and well thought out human psychology levers are very important in products of today. I long for the days of building a simple site for my company. No fancy wizards, bifurcating flow, or complex animations. I unfortunately don’t think we’re going back to that time though.
- coding123 5y ago
  Not necessarily. Look at the site we're on. They don't monetize, but I bet if they did it would make millions per year.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    If they monetized they'd cease being simple because it'd be less profitable than implementing user-hostile "engagement" practices.
  - carlgreene 5y ago
    HN is an outlier and you know it ;). I do wish more sites were like HN both in terms simplicity and community
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    There are YC adds on HN though in the feed, so I guess you can say HN moneyizes? E.g. this job add was on my feed right now: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moderntreasury/dc9bcfe8-64ef-4377-ad74-0cdbca3be694 https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moderntreasury/dc9bcfe8-64ef-4377-a...
notjustanymike 5y ago
UX design is heavily influenced by rules and research, just like engineering. There are systems at play which I'm sure the company would like to keep consistent. While you may be able to build a working page, can you ensure that every engineer builds it with the same interactions, flows, language, and even colors? Will you build and test it for the users the UX team has researched, or will you build it for yourself?
- hpoe 5y ago
  I can actually by just sourcing a CSS file that has the color scheme defined and that can be changed as needed. I can keep consistentancy by just having a JS library that has our components. As for flow no I can't because different situations and objectives require different workflows to force them all to be the same is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea until it is clearly not. But the funny thing about all of that is that everything listed above has to be done either way, and usually the UX guys will shove it off on engineering to implement so where is their value add....?
apercu 5y ago
Developers creating user experiences that don't actually take in to account what the user needs to achieve as tasks many many times a day are entirely the reason we now have UX people.
onion2k 5y ago
I feel like 20 years ago I was empowered at places I worked to add features or menu options or even entire screens that made sense. My first startup made an application that tried to control changes to projects and stop scope creep, and this reminds me why I thought there was a market for it. :)
spamizbad 5y ago
Yeah, I have noticed a certain measure of developer autonomy has been lost, going to product management (who in-turn defer to design/UX). I don't think it's all bad: I always appreciated expertise when it comes to esthetic and experiential parts of software. What I do find frustrating is when they only concern themselves "happy path", and developers don't have the authority to fill in the gaps. It creates a waterfall-like experience where you are often stuck waiting to hear back from product/design to make a decision because they didn't consider a scenario where the user might submit a form with an incorrect field or some other seemingly obvious path. Another bad practice is product people who assume screenshots or Figma files are technical requirements; not realizing these only give you clues as to how something will look, not how something will work, so flows and business logic go under-examined by product, which can lead to more "let's hold off on that, let me think about it" after telling you to start something ASAP.
- BreakfastB0b 5y ago
  I like to call this the human centipede of product development. This is why I only work at smaller companies where this is less of a problem.
- emptysea 5y ago
  Design at my current place doesn't include loading and error states in their designs so we have to free hand those ourselves. IMHO, loading states and error states are one of the more important parts of the design since they'll be seen often (for loading) and when the product isn't working for a user (error states).

Kranar 5y ago

Many "UX persons" are engineers or computer scientists, and having a good working relationship with them and seeing them as equals goes a long way to allowing you to provide your own insight and give suggestions and feedback.

hpoe 5y ago
I envy you if that is your experience. Almost all UX persons I have worked with have a degree in "Design" and are artsy type that tell me. "You can't make this blue it just doesn't vibe with the green we have." Many of who use the argument "Apple/Google does it this way" I'm not saying your now right it's just been my experience that they aren't engineers or Computer Scientists.
- exdsq 5y ago
  I've seen what happens when computer scientists go off on their own and design a user-centric product. Trust me, its good to have an 'artsy type'. I worked on a project with some pretty 'famous' CS guys (obviously relative to the field) and their form of documentation were essentially quizzes for the users to work through. Practically an end of term exam. It was crazy.
carlmr 5y ago
The problem is not necessarily their incompetence, but that they're given the exclusive right to dictate every detail of the UX. The problem is that they often don't know the constraints of the system you're working with, something that only comes with actually working on the implementation. E.g. I was working on a display. The graphics were designed by a UX Team. However the display only had 256 colors, had to be readable outside, had a 320x240 resolution. They had designed everything as vector graphics with highest color settings on really good Eizo monitors. The customer thought the designs look cool, and I wasn't given any freedom in improving them. I tried discussing the constraints with them, but because they were "on top" they wouldn't listen. In the end the customer saw the prototype and said it looked terrible. But I had all the communication with the UX Team and them that I wasn't allowed to make it work for this display. In the end it cost everyone an extra month and a lot of frustration to arrive at basically what I suggested when I first checked the hardware. The problem isn't to learn about UX, it's that you have a "UX person" that may not know about UX and dictates the terms.
- spicybright 5y ago
  That sounds discouraging. But you can apply the same story about any manager-like figure, no? If one's priority is design freedom or whatever, a good working relationship with your higher ups is the best chance to enable that. Working well with managers is also a good strat for becoming one yourself, and having more influence over things you care about.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    >you can apply the same story about any manager-like figure, no? True, the problem is more when companies become more and more top-heavy over time. These intermediate layers are created. With every layer it becomes less likely that the people that can actually decide won't ever hear valuable feedback until it's too late. >Working well with managers is also a good strat for becoming one yourself, and having more influence over things you care about. In the end I showed them what had to be done to make it look decent on this kind of display. Because all layers of management were in the room, they managed to decide to do these changes. It's just a very inefficient way to get to this point.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  That very painful example sounds like a bad setup where clear technical constraints weren’t taken in to account. People not listening come in all forms. UX, dev, MBA.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > necessarily their incompetence, but that they're given the exclusive right to dictate every detail of the UX. Unless you have valid reason to think the user would prefer your way, this sounds like the correct chain of command for a strong product.
  - varjag 5y ago
    …aand we're back to waterfall
    - 5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
Most of the ones I have ever encountered are former graphic design people.
- ratww 5y ago
  For me it is 100% former graphic design people. In fact I've seen several engineers trying to migrate to UX but the gatekeeping and prejudice made them give up.
eplanit 5y ago
I've worked with many, and none have ever had a bona fide engineering or comp. sci. background, except for a few who didn't cut it in the ranks of developers, and so redirected themselves or were shunted off to UI (now "UX" to make it sound cool) -- they've all been visual artist types. I find it best to get high-level (graphics, the css, color schemes) design ideas from them, and then leave it to the engineers for implementation, who might tweak/adjust/remove some items in order to balance with performance, usability, and sanity. If, instead, UX is given "authori-tie" then it becomes ridiculous, fast.
chii 5y ago
the problem happens when they aren't your equal, but the workplace is too politically correct for you to bluntly point it out. All you can do is suggest improvements, if at all.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  When I'm working with a colleague who has a specialty, I don't generally concern myself with whether they're "my equal" but rather, whether they bring something constructive to the table, in their specialty. I find "graphic designers" to be enormously helpful in solving problems related to user interaction and judgment with regard to use of color, typeface, and effective use of limited screen real-estate. There are good ones and bad ones. The key is to assess where they are, and learn how to communicate with them with regards to any technical impacts. The last thing I'd want to do in collaborating with a team-mate is summarily judge them as "my inferior". But that's (unfortunately) just me.
  - chii 5y ago
    > summarily judge them as "my inferior" most organizations that tend to have office politics and are very politically-correct in their behaviour tends to end up with people in roles calling shots, despite those shots not being great. graphics designers is just one example of this that i've seen, where a poor UI or bad UX is mocked up, but because you're an engineer, you do not get to have much input or your input is regarded as irrelevant (because your role is to code, not do UX design). That's what i mean by the "inferior" comment - that the UX/UI designer isn't as good at their craft as you are in implementing code.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
I have worked at over a dozen companies of various scales and never once met a "UX Person" that was an engineer or a computer scientist, let alone have any formal education or experience with human-computer interaction. They were glorified web designers at best, and them dreaming up ridiculous features with no technical know-how, ultimately leading to "compromises" (aka. massive amounts of technical debt) was the #1 contributor to lack of morale and engineer churn at every single one.
bjornsing 5y ago
Eh? When one person dictates every aspect of the end result to another person there’s definitely some inequality there, but doesn’t it run in the opposite direction to the one you imply?
ratww 5y ago
The thing is that the "seeing as equals" has to cut both ways. UX people, UI designers and PO/PMs who see developers purely as interface xerox machines don't really deserve much respect.
hsn915 5y ago
This comment is condescending and disrespectful. 1) I've never met a UX person who is a programmer. Most of them are from graphic design background, sometimes for vouchers or magazines and they don't necessarily understand that the computer screen is not the same kind of medium as a piece of paper. 2) Having a professional relationship entails pushing back and questioning. Being a "yes man" to the UX people is not a good working relationship. The implication of your comment is in order to push back and provide feedback I must first acknowledge my subservience to their whims and only once they approve of my work I may humbly submit some suggestions for their kind consideration.

MattGaiser 5y ago

One of the things that really surprised me working as a software engineer was how much my work would be judged how how well it matched the drawing. It often seems like there is more verification of that than whether it does what was intended.

mgkimsal 5y ago
But... for most of the reviewers/team, what was intended is that the result look like the drawing. That's it. "Here's a mockup - we spent a lot of time on this". "OK... what does it look like on tablet, mobile, what are the failure states, what should error handling look like?" "We spent a lot of time on this - make it look like the mockup". Had a project years ago that was... almost as bad as that sounds.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I worked on a project where the buy button was off the screen on anything but a wide monitor. So I could not see it on my laptop.
jollybean 5y ago
It's an easy thing to inspect for, and, most UX designers have pixel perfect expectations, which is actually not unreasonable in most cases as every pixel generally does have it's place. The problem of course is that it's too easy to focus on pixel perfection at the cost of other things. Recently, I've worked on a project and we had to force ourselves to 'not care' about those things until the very end when we did clean up.
- legulere 5y ago
  But aren’t projects where you don’t have time to work in the details not also projects where the next project is waiting around the corner?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I'd be totally fine with UX designers having final authority on these matters if more of them were actually good at UX design. It seems that UX these days just means making interfaces that match some arbitrary opinion of "beautiful" without any actual regard to what works and doesn't for a user interface. I miss when actual UX designers did actual studies to find actually good ways to put interfaces together.

atatatat 5y ago
Well-put. Thanks for noticing — I hope to be on a project of yours soon.
pm90 5y ago
I believe that most trained UI/UX designers (ie those who have internalized that UX is supposed to help people and not just how fancy or standard conformant you can get) do build pretty great designs, but I’ve noticed a lot of ego in this area from design leaders in my personal experience. Nearly every time design becomes political and every change needs to be conformant to even the most minute standards even if they may not have any material effects on the product. I think the field just has a lot of shitty “leaders”, most of the “grunts” I’ve worked with have been incredibly helpful and willing to think out of the box to make UX easier.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Death by 1000 cuts. "Is this component really that shitty for the user?" is how you end up with...hell, insert any Enterprise software here.
swiley 5y ago
I'd completely disagree. Software engineers tend to be very pragmatic. Perhaps it's really due to the involvement of the community but you look at open source software that has no "UX person" and it tends to be miles ahead of closed software that has them.
- p0nce 5y ago

madeofpalk 5y ago

Oof this kind of adversarial us vs them doesn't sound great! In well functioning product teams everyone should be working together to make a better product, recognising the roles and strengths of each other. If this isn't the case, then your org has bigger problems.

mgkimsal 5y ago
>everyone should be working together to make a better product That's rarely the top priority for everyone on the team at the same time. Design folks want to 'design', and agreeing that 'feature X' doesn't need to be in the screens - even if it's "the better product", doesn't align with their career need to have showcase material for the next job interview. Similar with tech/dev folks - an update feature might just need simple poll mechanism, but that doesn't give them experience with building a full pub/sub scalable architecture platform, or testing out the newest messaging libraries. The more people on that team, the more conflicting priorities there will be.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  > In well functioning product teams This doesn't sound like a great team, and doesn't really align with my (sure, admittedly limited) experience. I've only really worked once with someone who had strongly personally motivations that worked against the teams goal, and it was recognised that they were a wanker.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    the notion of "a better product" is... way too amorphous. without a lot of definition and constraints, people can make solid arguments for 'the good of the project' which also align with their personal goals (new tech, more design, etc) and it's often very hard to argue against those, because they sound good aren't necessarily 'wrong'.
ElViajero 5y ago
> If this isn't the case, then your org has bigger problems. That is completely true. To work together to build a product, to have everybody understanding what is what needs to be achieved, and collaboration in general is the way to go. In organizations where business does not trust engineering, engineering does not trust design ... things are never going to work. It is a collaborative effort, one point of view is insufficient to create an attractive product in a cost-effective way that is not full of tech-debt.

sam0x17 5y ago

This is true. One way to combat it I've found (as a CTO) is to ensure backend engineers are involved in the initial pre-mockup conversations and mockup iteration conversations and to give them just as much vetoing power as someone from bizdev. In some orgs this is impossible but it works great for us. I also find that backend people tend to have extremely good ideas when it comes to UX (better, even, than a lot of UX people), they just don't enjoy or aren't good at executing these ideas (or aren't allowed to). The takeaway is to take your backend engineers' opinions seriously and let them touch the frontend when they want to.

brightball 5y ago

I'm a big fan of prototyping functionality with no UX input at all, so that the engineers have full authority to look at all the moving parts and figure out the best way to make them work...without any design constraints. At the point we have a functional prototype, go through it with UX so they can understand all of the pieces before they do the design. Sometimes it leads to minor improvements on what the engineers already came up with. Other times it leads to an overhaul. But as long as all of the core functionality is built first, iterating on the design will just be moving a few things around.

carlgreene 5y ago

This is because the UI/UX of a 2021 website/app is far more involved and complicated than that of a 2001 website/app. Product cohesion and well thought out human psychology levers are very important in products of today. I long for the days of building a simple site for my company. No fancy wizards, bifurcating flow, or complex animations. I unfortunately don’t think we’re going back to that time though.

coding123 5y ago
Not necessarily. Look at the site we're on. They don't monetize, but I bet if they did it would make millions per year.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  If they monetized they'd cease being simple because it'd be less profitable than implementing user-hostile "engagement" practices.
- carlgreene 5y ago
  HN is an outlier and you know it ;). I do wish more sites were like HN both in terms simplicity and community
- rightbyte 5y ago
  There are YC adds on HN though in the feed, so I guess you can say HN moneyizes? E.g. this job add was on my feed right now: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moderntreasury/dc9bcfe8-64ef-4377-ad74-0cdbca3be694 https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/moderntreasury/dc9bcfe8-64ef-4377-a...

notjustanymike 5y ago

UX design is heavily influenced by rules and research, just like engineering. There are systems at play which I'm sure the company would like to keep consistent. While you may be able to build a working page, can you ensure that every engineer builds it with the same interactions, flows, language, and even colors? Will you build and test it for the users the UX team has researched, or will you build it for yourself?

hpoe 5y ago
I can actually by just sourcing a CSS file that has the color scheme defined and that can be changed as needed. I can keep consistentancy by just having a JS library that has our components. As for flow no I can't because different situations and objectives require different workflows to force them all to be the same is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea until it is clearly not. But the funny thing about all of that is that everything listed above has to be done either way, and usually the UX guys will shove it off on engineering to implement so where is their value add....?

apercu 5y ago

Developers creating user experiences that don't actually take in to account what the user needs to achieve as tasks many many times a day are entirely the reason we now have UX people.

onion2k 5y ago

I feel like 20 years ago I was empowered at places I worked to add features or menu options or even entire screens that made sense. My first startup made an application that tried to control changes to projects and stop scope creep, and this reminds me why I thought there was a market for it. :)

spamizbad 5y ago

Yeah, I have noticed a certain measure of developer autonomy has been lost, going to product management (who in-turn defer to design/UX). I don't think it's all bad: I always appreciated expertise when it comes to esthetic and experiential parts of software. What I do find frustrating is when they only concern themselves "happy path", and developers don't have the authority to fill in the gaps. It creates a waterfall-like experience where you are often stuck waiting to hear back from product/design to make a decision because they didn't consider a scenario where the user might submit a form with an incorrect field or some other seemingly obvious path. Another bad practice is product people who assume screenshots or Figma files are technical requirements; not realizing these only give you clues as to how something will look, not how something will work, so flows and business logic go under-examined by product, which can lead to more "let's hold off on that, let me think about it" after telling you to start something ASAP.

BreakfastB0b 5y ago
I like to call this the human centipede of product development. This is why I only work at smaller companies where this is less of a problem.
emptysea 5y ago
Design at my current place doesn't include loading and error states in their designs so we have to free hand those ourselves. IMHO, loading states and error states are one of the more important parts of the design since they'll be seen often (for loading) and when the product isn't working for a user (error states).