
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career - mtviewdave
https://medium.com/twenty-years-in-the-valley/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-i-ve-made-in-my-career-72bf27c538b4
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panic
This title is a bit clickbaity. To save you a click: the author's mistake was,
as a designer, to stop writing interactive prototypes and to go back to making
static screenshots instead.

~~~
grecy
I would take that a step higher in abstraction and say

"His mistake was to stop going above and beyond because someone told him it
wasn't required"

The lesson we can all take from this is to give you absolute best - if your
immediate manager(s) are not ready for it, don't stop just because they can't
handle it.

~~~
foobarian
Actually even further--

"His mistake was to fail to defend a better, interactive workflow enabled by
new technology that could have helped the company tremendously, and instead
fell in line."

The lesson for me is, we have to think critically, recognize real
opportunities for the company, and argue for them. To fail to do so is not
doing your job.

------
_s
Two or three of the best designers that I would never hesitate to recommend
all know how to code. They know exactly what's possible in which browser, and
they organise their assets, mockups, designs, documentation so beautifully
that as a developer I actually look forward to bringing their designs to life.

More often than not I'll shy away from doing front-end precisely because a
lack of understanding from a designers part on what's possible or what needs
to be hacked together using ludicrous amounts of JS/CSS workarounds;
especially since these very designs or ideas is what the client or PM okays /
is expecting.

Just my $0.02 - as a dev I'd love you quite a lot of you knew what I do and
help me by taking the limitations into account :)

~~~
mgkimsal
Likewise, devs need to - politely, but firmly - know how to push back on some
'designs'. I push back on bad designs - things that obviously won't be usable
on multiple devices, have demonstrably poor UI, etc - when I know that the
'design' was done in a vacuum, without any testing or acknowledgement of web
realities.

I've worked some truly awesome design folks over the years, but also had some
folks have their 'designer' send me a PSD from themeforest that they went in
and added crap to that made it essentially unusable, then charged the client
$800 for a $30 theme.

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coldcode
So, should programmers learn how to design? Oddly enough in the 80's
programmers were the designers for the most part. The idea of a standalone
designer was more of a web idea from the mid-90's. Before then we all
considered design as a part of programming. The one app I built from 1988-1993
that is still sold (many owners later) has many features remaining identical
to what I designed despite being the lead programmer. Today people laugh at
the idea.

I think the more everyone on the team understands all the specialties the
better the app is likely to be.

~~~
civilian
I think I have learned some web design just from using the internet for the
last 15 years. I'm not a phenomenal designer, but I've got some intuition and
can make some simple choices.

And I get really nervous when my company's designer wants to adding a scroll
bar to a modal dialog. :-(

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huuu
Since CSS2/3 I never touched design programs again to design websites and web
apps. It's so easy to trow a basic interface together and then use CSS to give
it nice looks. So this became my way of work:

    
    
      * Build a simple HTML template as interaction design
      * Add some basic design (style, color, fonts)
      * With the customer fine tune the design
      * Add code to the templates to make it all work (or hand it over to development)
    

Ofcourse you still need design experience. You are just using other tools.

~~~
sixdimensional
I agree it is easy to throw a basic interface together in HTML/CSS/JS,
oftentimes the code is reusable and this approach can be pretty effective.
However, I'll present a reason you should NOT do that - if you are working
with non-technical users /designers in a joint-application-design (JAD) or
collaborative type session.

When you are sitting next to someone, and you are designing UI, and you have
to open anything that looks like code, it can throw off non-technical people
severely. Oh, sure I can make this box bigger, let me just change this
property on some CSS, adjust this div and then refresh the screen?

I have done both styles, using tools like Balsamiq and Axure RP, paper
prototypes, whiteboard prototypes, fat-client prototypes using desktop UI
frameworks, and prototypes in HTML/CSS/JS. I think the advice here is, make
sure you know the audience you're working with, and that having to interleave
code with the design process doesn't throw off the workflow (even if only
basic coding).

~~~
mercer
I used to sit down with a client and change elements of the design right from
the developer tools. In theory, it's a nice approach.

In practice, it meant that clients started to have unrealistic expectations of
1) how many changes they could ask me to make over time, and 2) how much time
it would take to make a change.

So nowadays I only do this with designers that I work with, at set times, or
with clients that I know I can trust.

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saintfiends
I completely agree with this one. Designers and UI/UX developers are not
mutually exclusive. It works better when it's the same team/person.

It works really well when designers know what they are catering to. In case of
browsers, it saves a lot of time when they know browser differences, or when
they know JavaScript / CSS capabilities.

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protomyth
What a less than visionary manager. I would love UI folks to make a prototype
of how they envision the UI to work. It helps a lot and allow for some quick
feedback from both the biz and the programmer who has to do the programming.
Its in the same ballpark as writing the user manual first then starting to
program the project (Pages by Pages, I do believe).

I knew a couple of consultants who did enterprise process work and also knew
Shockwave. They would program a demo of each process. A little figure moving
paper from place to place gets the point across better than any PowerPoint
presentation ever will.

------
qzxvwt
I have a feeling my biggest mistake will have been not adding "blog-writer" to
my list.

------
segmondy
My worst mistake as a developer is the inverse, not learning how to design.

------
mgkimsal
If 'designs' are intended to be reused across multiple areas - print, tv, web,
whatever... - I cut designers a bit of slack in terms of deliverables. When
the designers are primarily/exclusively working in the 'web' or 'mobile'
portion of their industry, and yet, after several years, do not know how to
even start to test ideas out in a browser, it's a sign that that they don't
care about their work or career as much as I though they did (or as much as
they probably think they do).

Even 15 years ago, the best design folks I worked with could do basic HTML
stuff, to at least test out their core ideas. We'd review them, and I'd point
out some problems we'd have cross-browser, or limitations of JS interaction at
that time, and we'd iterate some ideas. They understood enough of the web
portion (and these folks came from print) that when I explained (or could
demonstrate) the problems in code, which they'd already written some of, they
knew _why_ the problems were there. They could _know_ something was actually
_not possible_ to recreate in pixel-perfect fashion across IE3,4,5, NS2,3,4,
WebTV and Opera, because they had experienced a site was more than displaying
a single JPG file on a website with a massive HTML map area (did a couple of
those WAY early on - insane).

Don't send me a photoshop file with 280 layers, one for each rounded corner on
the 17 round corner boxes with too-small text which only looks good on your 30
inch triple monitors please. It's not going to translate and give the same
'feel' on multiple screens. (how come it's OK for you to not have to know
html/css, but I have to have a photoshop license to work with you? and your
agency complains about how expensive I am to boot?).

I don't expect you to be an expert in coding/layout, but I do expect you to
know the basics. Similarly, I'm fine with knowing how to open PS files, resize
images, export to different formats when you don't deliver what I ask for,
etc. I can't do all of your job, you can't do all of mine, but let's have some
familiarity with each others' worlds, OK?

About 20-30% of the design folks I've dealt with have truly 'got it', when it
comes to designing for the medium, and understanding the tools. Most of them
also did it in print, and would have an understanding of copywriting basics,
font impacts, etc, as well as paper issues (printing on different paper types
could impact colors, glossy vs matte, whatever). They understood the print
medium, because they understood the basics of paper, then got in to web and
understood the basics of web (HTML/CSS/etc). For better or worse, the other
70+% of folks just don't get it, or seem to care.

The older I get, the easier it is to choose to not work with those folks, but
for the first several years of web work, I couldn't put my finger on why it
was so much more productive working with person A vs person B.

