I see lots of “should designers code?” articles and introductions to coding for designers. I see far less interest in the converse. So what’s a designer think? Cap Watkins, a designer; Should Engineers Design?:
If you think design is 100% about creating “design artifacts”, I’d say your scope is too narrow and has the potential to stunt your personal and professional growth.
There’s so much to designing that isn’t about choosing colors, fonts, producing icons, or drawing. Developers can, and should, get involved in how the applications works, how copy guides the user through workflows, when to prompt about invalid data and when to fix it automatically, and how to help users through interactions. That’s design!
To wit:
Throughout my entire career I’ve had engineering partners deep in the design process with me. I show them sketches, bounce ideas off of them, have whiteboarding sessions to figure out what we’re going to do. I trust engineers I work with to let me know when something seems confusing, when there’s an edge case I haven’t thought of and to push on my ideas to find where they break and help me make them even better.
Developers often don’t even realize they’re designing when they’re building libraries and tools for other developers. Writing a good README so developers know why your project is awesome and how to use it? That’s design. Sweating the details of an OO or REST API? That’s design. Opting to remove a feature or solve two problems with one feature? That’s design!
The design was in us the whole time, and we didn’t even know it!
I leave you with this excellent wisdom:
When you look at design as a process and not an artifact, everyone on your team becomes a designer. We have different areas of expertise and skill, no doubt, but the product experience belongs to every member of the team. The more familiar you are with each other’s responsibilities, the more you’re able to participate with and help each other out when needed.
Here’s a fun thing I do that you should try: when you read articles about design, squint a little bit and pretend it’s about designing programs. You might find something you want to try the next time you sit down to work on some code.
