What good is a "UI designer"?

Question

I have been a software developer for twenty years. I create UI all the time. I cannot see how a job creating just the UI could justify a full time employee. Do the developers not design their own UI lie I do?

Is the job title just something made up to appease all the Gen X" out there looking for jobs that are a "walk in the park"?

Answer 1

In my experience, software developers build stuff to suit themselves and operate on the premise of, "If it works for me on my machine, then it works." Time and budgets are devoted to loads of fancy features with little thought given to user task logic, strategic placement of UI elements for repetitive tasks, UI clutter and noise, etc. Were it not for UI and UX designers to advocate for the user, many of you software developers would be out of work due to scores of repeated failed products.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

I went to a UX conference several years ago, and have been developing software for small businesses for 15 years now. UI/X design is a real thing, and really important thing. Many times in smaller companies, there's the inclination that the marketers or decision-makers or programmers can create interfaces that pretty much make sense and are good enough. In my experience, those notions are usually heavily influenced by budget. "Why hire a designer to make it flashy when it works?"



That's fine for a certain level of product marketed to certain consumers. Other markets have very different requirements, and depending on the growth potential of your software company, you may have to bite the bullet at some point and bring in a UX professional to keep your business growing. Not only that, but once UX design became a real valuable profession in the market, the businesses without a designer will all eventually end-up looking second rate, even if they have a superior product, and that can be a major problems for a company.



A good UI/X "designer" can be a very valuable asset.

Answer 4

Many companies have branding strategies that require specific UI standards, color palettes, css classes etc.... A good UI designer can incorporate all of these concerns and free up developers to work strictly on business logic, event handling and other tasks. Two different developers can create markedly different UI's and having one person do them all can be a huge benefit to the company.

Answer 5

UI Design got complex pretty quickly. A professional UI Designer is usually someone with a background in graphic design and user response, whereas programmers focus on the maintainability and functionality of code. What a programmer like us would see as easy to use is not necessarily what the user sees, so a UI Designer is called in. UI Designers do light programming but are focused primarily on UX (user experience).



A common situation is that concurrently to the developer working on the backend, the UI developer will check out the same project from source control but immediately begin developing only the UI. This doesn't turn into a nightmare because design planning makes it so that the backend dev will expose an expected interface that is already agreed upon. This way, the UI dev can make several different UI designs, focused primarily on how the user workflow is handled and how the various UI's should be set up (web, WinForms, etc). Loosely coupled design is what makes this possible.



This benefits the programming team in a couple of ways. First, the backend devs can drop the project and keep moving with something else when their portion is done. The majority of updates after that are all UI, because someone wanted an extra button here or a different view for different staff members there. The second benefit to the team is that a specialist who is focused on UX prevents a lot of guesswork and keeps the project from having major changes in beta, as they've been consulted (preferably via AGILE) during the UI development process.

Answer 6

Sure, while programmers can create UIs, is it really worth their time or effort in being a creative? That's how you waste and frustrate talent.



Make people focus on ONE thing. Let them solve one problem. UI and UX are two different problems. As is figuring out how to implement them in code.

Answer 7

Designing a UI is no easy job. Developers chose a UI which they feel is the best. UI designers take customer's requirements and analyzes end-users and then use some design principles to make effective UI's. Don't think it's some small job which has been given its title just for fun!

Answer 8

The point of UI designers, and by extension, UX (User Experience) designers, is to have someone who thinks like a common user. As programmers we have different ideas of where menu items should go, or where and what to call a button in our application but as programmers we think about things different than many of our users. Many users these days seldom if ever touch a computer as we know them (the desktop box and monitor type). They interact with mobile devices such as phones and tablets and as such use them much differently than the desktop machines. "Why Software Sucks" by Platt is a good read and hammers home the idea over and over again that we are not our user. The latest episode of Silicon Valley (on HBO) kind of dealt with this topic of how we as programmers tend to view our creation much differently than a non-programmer.

Answer 9

Aren't they the ones that do all those paper prototyping you see in promo videos of popular apps?