
Is there a difference between Developer & Designer? - kingsidharth
http://addisonkowalski.tumblr.com/post/2792738974/this-happens-too-often
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obviator
A bigger problem (for developers and designers) is when people don't realise
there's a difference between "Client" and "Designer".

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j_baker
I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do
things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the
easiest explanation I can come up with.

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nathos
Actually, I'd say that a proper designer actually _designs_ how your site
should work. Developers implement, hack, do backend stuff, etc.

"Making a site pretty" is what too many coders think they need a designer for
at the end of their projects ("skin my app!"), when perhaps they should be
working with real designers from the get-go.

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gte910h
I think you're describing a user interface engineer with a design background.

There is definitely a place for "Person who makes pretty". There is a place
for "Person who makes it work well from a human computer interaction
persepctive".

No reason for it to be the same person.

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nathos
Agreed. In reality, many developers have plenty of design experience & skill
as well.

I like to separate design from pure art, subscribing to the Steve Jobs "design
is how it works" mentality. To me, design is as much an engineering discipline
as an aesthetic one.

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gte910h
While that is a good definition for the word design, the people who make
software pretty usually have an art background where at best they specialize
in layout (as a subset of spacing, etc), not user interaction design or
industrial design degree. That degree is a thing all to it's own, and what
much of the Apple aesthetic comes from. An industrial design degree is
actually closer to architecture than art in many programs.

There is actual training required to be good at real design for most people.
I'm saying most "designers" actually have art training. They might do the job
you talk about, and want to do, but they're not the ones trained in it, and
not necessarily any more apt at it than the programmer or janitor.

Some are quite talented at it. Some aren't. But that doesn't mean their
wonderful art isn't incredibly awesome, even though they don't know program
flow very well at all.

All this isn't saying there can't be tremendous variation in what a person can
learn on their own, mind you, but many people do considerably better in
something they have a formal background in.

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kiubo
Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but
when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the
internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on
print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with
more than 5 years under their belt.

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gte910h
Again, I'm just trying to argue against nomenclature that's confusing issues
here: I feel you're improperly advertising yourself when you call yourself a
designer these days if you really do know the science of interaction design
and can use its tools. A great majority of people who are designers do more
beautification than usability. You need a different noun if you're truly doing
real usability stuff, including the studies, heatmaps etc, that make up the UI
Usability world's process.

>/UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing

I'm going to disagree with you about this. It was a specialization in many
schools by the end of the 90s in computer science departments (Called Human
Computer Interaction). I have two very dear friends with degrees in it who are
29 and 32. Here is one such program:
[http://www.gradadmiss.gatech.edu/programs/multidisciplinary/...](http://www.gradadmiss.gatech.edu/programs/multidisciplinary/hci.php)
Actual industrial design degrees (which are pretty applicable to software)
have been around for decades.

There is a big difference between "People who make things pretty" and "People
who make things interact well with people" and the training _is_ different.
Now if a person trained in one of those worked on self training the other, it
still seems like calling themselves something acknowledging the dual nature of
what they do: Something like UX Engineer and Graphic Designer would be more
exact than the term "UX Designer" which in practice usually seems to mean
"Artist who makes things pretty then loudly, without good reasons, without a
willingness to understand costs or decades of human/computer interaction,
requires a large amount of authority acceded to him without further
explanation and requires we do a lot of things just so without talking about
tradeoffs because he doesn't seem to really have a mental model to talk about
what he does so can't really compromise well and retailor his solutions to the
issue".

Those using the title often feels like people trained to do good art (even
good commercial art) refusing to do a job and explain themselves when how they
want their art animated doesn't actually make for good user interactions or
would cost 3 arms and 3 legs more than the client has.

A lot of this is a function of how people without true backgrounds and
training in design get into the field: the computing field is super tolerant
of people not trained in this stuff but who get stuff done. Happens with
programming too. But programming is a little less tolerant of handwavy BS than
art is (at a point, its a "did it work" thing which is somewhat demonstrable
for programming). Where "Did it work" for design isn't really as testable
without a user study. (I'm not saying non-trained by a college to do this
thing shouldn't be in the field, just that they're less filtered).

Now, all of this isn't to mean: Designers shouldn't know the flow of what
they're doing the art for. But until a designer show me a track record of UI
improvement and comes equipped with the tools to show you made something
better, lay off the misguided airs of certainty. Those tools exist. I feel if
you can't use them, and can't prove yourself you got to let your client know
this is most art than science and they should also really listen to other
voices in the process.

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kiubo
I will agree with you on the points of nomenclature. But most of everything
else you said sounds anecdotal stemming from a possible bad personal
experience you might have had.

Just because HCI has been studied for several decades now, it doesn't mean it
has been WIDELY studied, understood and applied as a concept from the
beginning. Just because you have a friend who studied it back in the late 90's
it doesn't mean that it was a subject matter covered nation-wide by all
universities by any stretch of the imagination and even less so as a concept
widely considered by developers of the time when making their interfaces for
their digital products. The examples of good interface design from this era
are few. The only point I was trying to make was that it is expected to have a
lot of designers from non-computer science backgrounds working in these fields
at the moment because they are new fields. 20, 30, years is nothing when
thinking about the lifetime of a profession. I'm older than the first Xerox
GUI. It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in
terms of "art". It only shows your possible(I dont really know you) lack of
understanding of both design and art.

Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable
which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason.
As you probably know but may have have forgotten, in HCI it is impossible to
divorce the human aspect from the computer aspect of the theory. Humans are
unpredictable, often preferring to go about doing things counter-intuitively
or in surprising ways. These decisions are mostly influenced by social or
genetic predispositions often which are unpredictable. There will never be 1
right answer or formula to anything regarding human interaction with anything.
Yet, somehow through proper design, developer's and designers have
increasingly been able manage this and adapt as things evolve quickly.

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gte910h
You completely missed my comment, saying the opposite of what I in fact said
in several places. I work with lots of people, generally speaking, 5-15 short
contracts a year doing drop in consulting on iPhone/Embedded Linux Devices,
including products under failure/needing rescue.

While not to the point my number has a small error rate, I assure you people I
am describing exist a number of places, completely unrelated to my short stay
with them. They're pretty well disliked by the internal engineers at their job
too, but management doesn't always listen as closely to the internal employees
as to to me. Your psychoanalysis is wrong. I know good ones too! And I've had
this conversation telling them why an engineer will think they're so damn
good.

My issue is only with the fakers.

>It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms
of "art".

I never said they only think in terms of art. Most seem (when trained) to be
trained in either web design specifically, or graphic design, specifically
print based graphical design.

Lots of them do think in terms of more than art. However these fakers are
terrified of discourse about their work, unwilling to defend why it is better
than lower cost alternatives, and often terrified/huge foes of quantification
of their work. My issue is lots of them regurgitate cargo cult design from
smashing magazine, etc, without ever measuring their work and objecting
furiously when other start to put tools in place to do so.

>Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable
which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason

My issue is with those who refuse to accept the use of quantification of the
design. It _is very quantifiable_. _That is my only issue_. I know how to do
_absurdly_ useful verification techniques to quantify a design. Many UI
Designers get threatened no matter how carefully you tiptoe that into the
project plan. The insistance that many of these folk require that you follow
their ideas because humans are ineffable _even though we can actually time how
much better or worse their tiny button works_ is my frustration and pain until
I have this conversation with the person who they've already sold their idea
to. I'm talking abou the person who's trying to actively avoid developing
their own understanding of a 44px button doing better than a 22px button from
the statistics we deliver you on how many people miss with that small button
you have there, as shown to you with a 100 person beta test trying to do a
couple things.

I mean, these same people are the ones who bemoan trying two different
packages in a direct mail print campaign. They wouldn't do better in print
design either.

They should both know at least some of these better or at least on a
comparable level to me, or at the very least, be eager for data showing them
right or wrong, how well their job was performed.

I'm sure there are a few good guys out there with a non-college training
regimen who don't come from a graphic design background in this stuff, because
as you mentioned, it's a young field. But I'm tired of people claiming
authority on crap and not backing it up. I'm tired of them resisting putting
measurement in place when all we require is "we're seeing a lot of errors
doing X, please look for a way that has a lower error rate".

This isn't an invective against all people who call themselves UI Designers.
It pointing out that term is over broad and you're associating yourself with a
bunch of fakes by calling yourself that. They're often unwilling to engage in
productive discussion with the rest of the product team, and who often recoil
from objective measurement of their work.

If it makes you feel better: Programmers who apply for jobs have a seeming
90-95% "can't program at all" rate in my experience. I mean, dirt simple
stuff. UI Designers have a smaller fraud rate than them :D. And I'm pretty
sure programmers have taken "being full of BS" to heretofore unseen levels.
But enough about my field, lets talk more about yours :P

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pacomerh
If you do client work, you gotta be prepared for these questions and more.

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romaniv
There are people who specialize on drawing things, and there are people who
specialize on API-level programming. However, I'm a firm believer that a
developer who creates programs to be used by humans has to have designer
mentality as well. Trivial example: if your web app doesn't allow bookmarking
and breaks browser history, that's a usability issue. But you can't fix it at
the end of development process, it's something you have to be conscious about
from the start.

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pestaa
I have a bad experience in this regard. At my last startup, I was regularly
asked to hack HTML and CSS because the site constantly got ugly.

Not that I couldn't do it, but there was a designer who was hired every month
or two to do bigger chunks of fixing. It meant she added 42 divs for each bug
so it looked "ok".

Good designers are extremely hard to come by.

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Ogre
In game development, we're all developers. Designers, programmers and artists
are subsets of developer. Maybe producers too depending who you ask. They're
certainly part of the development team.

Is that not how it is everywhere else? In my brief non-gaming employment, I
don't think the word "developer" really came up.

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sev
There's a big difference. Designers create a visible element (it's look,
layout, color, position, etc.), developers code what that element does when a
user interacts with it.

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Andrewski
Designers use a GUI tool like Dreamweaver, or do not code at all.

Developers can make a program or web site using a text editor.

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kiubo
This it a lot less true today than it would have been several years ago. I'm a
designer and most of the younger designer's I know are comfortable programming
in several languages.

Anyway, your statement is an oversimplification. You could also say that the
website the designer made would have better usability and be more engaging for
the users (but perhaps buggy), while the developer would have a well coded
site that no one (except maybe other developers) would want to use.

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Andrewski
You aren't a designer if you actually produce code. If you "can" code but do
not, and use dreamweaver or a similar drawing to code tool, then yeah, you are
a designer.

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brackin
Good designers don't make good web designers, designers control how the
application will work and feel as they are the designer.

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tintin
There are developer designers and 'artists'. There are developer designers and
'nerds'.

