Jad Madi raised a topic that I'm sure all designers and developers think about regularly during their career: Who is better, developers or designers?
In my years of experience, I put on many hats: graphic/web design, development, architecture and analysis, management, even painted some walls while we were building our new offices. In each I felt that my work was not just very important, but essential to the success of the company. And that's the truth.
In a team, every member is an essential component that plays a unique role in pushing the ship toward its destination.
Having done both design and development, and now that I have to supervise our development team, I don't get to do as much hands-on development as I would like to, so I get to look at both fields from an unbiased point of view. I see them both as essential and in-separable, for two simple reasons:
- A great application has to be developed by someone who has the great programming skill and can produce an error/bug free experience for the user. Someone who can "design" his application with performance, security, scalability, in mind and compose the code in a way which is comprehendible to other developers on the team.
- This great application will be worth exactly "zero" if nobody can figure out how to use it, so it needs a very good designer who can "develop" an intuitive user experience. The user experience is the only single factor which can determine the success or failure of an application. If people can't use it, they won't buy it, and the company can’t pay the bills. Simple.
Now, can you imagine one without the other?
When it comes to producing software, both designers and developers have to be "designers and developers". Designing and producing high quality, bug free code is an art, and developing the user experience involves much more than just designing the interface.
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