Perhaps this little story will help anyone trying to understand what “UI” and “UX” mean and also why a developer is not necessarily a designer too:
My wife and I are remodeling a master bathroom because we live in a house built when people had very different ideas about these things. Now, of course, we have been in plenty of other bathrooms in our lives, so we know how they work and what’s functional and what we like, but we have never had to reinvent a bathroom from scratch, and it is daunting.
We have some fixed parameters of walls, dimensions, and a window. There are also constraints about electricity and plumbing that can only go here or there. But the real challenge for us is what to do with the tile — what type to choose, the color, accent, style and pattern of implementation. This decision alone will have a significant impact on the end result, and may very-well define the ultimate success of the project, even though the “look and feel” of our bathroom will only be a very superficial component (the bathroom will undoubtedly do what it needs to do, its function is not a worry).
So, the other day, we went around to a few tile showrooms to get some ideas of how to tackle this problem. We found some tiles we liked, but still have no idea what pattern to lay them in and if our choice would be appropriate for the size and configuration of the space. Eventually, I walked-up to the foreman at one shop and asked him who could help us with those sorts of decisions, because we were flailing.
He laughed. He said most people either have full-fledged blueprints from an architect, or just a bunch of pictures they have on a Pinterest (or pages torn from magazines). Then, in the showroom, their decisions are relatively easy in just matching the constraints specified by the plans or the examples they’ve already found. He said a good tiler-craftsman can work from that. They find the center “seam” of the room and know how to plot things out from there. All the rest is just the craft of the trade and knowing how to keep things up to code and spec.
But then I asked the foreman if they ever work with “designers,” you know, professionals who could help people like us who have some ideas but really need advice to inform fundamental decisions about our unique predicament. The guy laughed again, “Nope, you’d have to hire a contractor and they’d hire a designer.” IOW, designers don’t generally work piecemeal on a one-room project such as ours — and especially not for someone with a fistful of ideas already — but are usually interested in the bigger picture, making decisions consistent with the overall flow and theme of the home. A designer anticipates the use and user of the bathroom and what satisfies rather subjective qualities like aesthetic, taste, and comfort.
I should know this, of course, doing what I do as an interface designer and developer, but the analogy of it all caught me totally by surprise.
In a sense, our remodeling project could be construed as a typical “UI/UX” project. The tiling and fixtures could be considered the “interface” to our bathroom. All the underlying wiring, plumbing, wallboard and framing, of course, would be the integration details of that front-end, and the layout and position of everything contribute to the “UX” when the bathroom is used.
So, a person in need of an interactive application could follow the same process of undertaking a bathroom remodeling project—by building a Pinterest of solutions and ideas they like and bookmarking other applications that demonstrate attractive solutions to similar problems. But, ultimately the work will be done by a craftsman (a front-end engineer), using the tools of their trade, and employing frameworks and libraries that best match the examples provided.
This is all well and good if the project is rather standard and conventional. However, if a certain predicament is unique, or if sufficiently relevant examples can’t be found elsewhere, then what’s really needed is a “designer,” and this is true with a remodel project that is small and odd as much so as with an interactive application which may have very unique needs, constraints, and goals.
The reason being is that a craftsman/engineer is not a designer. Sure, that person may “design” their process, or have design-like methodology in how they ply their trade, but a craftsman only ever implements the overall design — be it a Pinterest, bookmarked example, or full-fledged blueprint. The craftsman takes into account the parameters and intent and “finds the seam” for conventional processes and procedures, but a designer must consider many other things, including and especially: What is most-appropriate for this specific challenge at hand — NOT just a rehash of what has already been done similarly somewhere else before.
Vice versa too, a designer is not necessarily a craftsman either. In fact, the act of design requires training and expertise that is completely different than what is required of a craftsman. On a Venn diagram, their respective disciplines would barely intersect.
Now, there are some people who can both design and engineer, sure, but many many more who can only do one of those things — and not because they haven’t learned the other thing yet, but because they just don’t have the aptitude or discipline or empathy or desire. The vast majority of UI developers nowadays do not design — by adamant choice and out of revered respect — and there are just as many designers who won’t venture beyond carving-out a crude prototype that barely functions code-wise.
This analogy is not too far from the truth. Tiling is a lot like front-end development. Both require significant skill, but ultimately only in the laying of prefabricated components that provide the color and style. Patterns and accents can add a lot, but often these are only slight deviations from what’s already been done before. This reproduction is cost-effective, of course, and fine for the customer since they’ll only ever be in one bathroom at a time. And anyway, customs and conventions are tried and true.
But the craftsman does not necessarily create the tile (or components), nor do they usually invent the conventions. They implement. This is a skill and a trade unto itself, but one that borrows heavily from design decisions made elsewhere by people with other skills and capabilities.
Designers could create tiles, or not, but their primary contribution is uniqueness, or at the very least, a very specific and appropriate solution to the challenge at hand. Maybe this is just a deeper and more sophisticated search for ideas, or maybe its a sketch from scratch, but it involves considering the challenge for what it is rather than what it is like.
Of course, there are craftsmen who design, and designers who can craft. The boundaries between these two are blurry, not fixed. But one discipline is not the other, even when just one person does them both.
I’m still not sure if we’ll hire a designer for our remodeling project. We are researching that now and will consider if we can afford the additional budget. We might just go with a library of Pinterest ideas and an expert craftsman, but that means we will need to contribute many decisions ourselves. This could turn-out okay or also go horribly wrong. We’ll see. Again, we’re not so worried about the function of the bathroom, but its interface is very important to us too.
The same is true when people need a UI. They should be careful about what they think that means and what the expectations will be of that person who does it. If the needs are rather pedestrian, and if frameworks and libraries can provide an adequate “look and feel,” then a journeyman front-end developer will be just fine. But if someone is needed to tease-out a unique solution to a perplexing problem, it should be acknowledged how that this is not necessarily an engineer at all, but someone else altogether.
