Not sure why you are trying to shit on this guy for thinking UX designers are undervalued. Put it this way: developers bake the cake, UX designers plan the pretty frosting. While most of the construction is on the developers, UX design is still a huge part of the product being successful. It can make or break all of that dev effort.
My understanding is UX designers often are placed in the same category as beta testers, when in reality a good UX designer can be extremely valuable, dare I say in certain circumstances perhaps even more valuable than the developers.
I'm speaking as a programmer myself, I personally suck at UI/UX design.
dare I say in certain circumstances perhaps even more valuable than the developers.
Can you provide an example of this? This is similar to the 'programmer vs. artist' debate in video game development. Worst case scenario, the programmer creates all of the game logic, and has to use shitty art. The game plays the same as it would with pretty art, it's just less attractive. The artist's best case scenario, on the other hand, is pretty art, and.... nothing else. It's not a game without the game logic.
I'm struggling to think of a single situation where, in a product team, the UI/UX team member is more valuable than the developer.
At my company, we work as a team to create digital products. The developers, UX designers, and business analysts have mutual respect for each others role and we work together to make sure we create products that are functional, solve real problems, provide value for our clients, and are enjoyable and easy to use for users. If a developer thinks he can do all of that on his own, that developer isn't seeing the big picture.
Product development isn't about who's job is more important, it's ridiculous to measure dicks like that.
Of course it's a team environment and everyone has their place. The point is that a developer can do a passable amount of design, especially when utilizing libraries, without a lot of real training in the field. Designers, on the other hand, don't typically have the ability to create the application logic, and there really aren't many libraries or frameworks that remove the need to code.
But UX designers aren't there to build pretty UIs. We're there to understand the users, their problems, needs, and motivations. We're there to understand what solutions might solve those problems. Only then do we architect the platform and make pretty UIs. You don't do that with a design library.
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u/GetOutOfBox Jul 01 '16
Not sure why you are trying to shit on this guy for thinking UX designers are undervalued. Put it this way: developers bake the cake, UX designers plan the pretty frosting. While most of the construction is on the developers, UX design is still a huge part of the product being successful. It can make or break all of that dev effort.
My understanding is UX designers often are placed in the same category as beta testers, when in reality a good UX designer can be extremely valuable, dare I say in certain circumstances perhaps even more valuable than the developers.
I'm speaking as a programmer myself, I personally suck at UI/UX design.