3 Things That Every Startup Has to Build

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Should UX designers know how to code? Should designers code?

To answer the question whether designers should code we need to take a short ride into the nature of the web development.

Design wasn’t an initial part of the web revolution. Sad but true. We needed to fight for our place in the web development process. And it wasn’t easy.

If you remember first version of e.g. Yahoo you can easily understand that while coding was already in place, design was the song of, back than, unforeseeable future.

It was important to have a website, rather than to have a website that creates great user experience. Obstacles in the interface were treated with great deal of understanding. People were so excited to be online, that couldn’t be bothered with minor shortcomings. Just think about it… in 1995 people were extremely happy with Windows 95.

Yahoo in 1995

Google in 1996

When competition finally arrived, term “usability” started to become popular and webmasters were expected to create something usable.

Last 15 years changed everything. Design is generally considered just as important as technology. User Experience Design became the key to success and it’s hard to imagine any grown-up company, without UXers on board.

Today designers are meant to design and coders/developers/programmers are out there to code amazing things. Both positions have been forced to split apart, just because both became equally important. The web started to get fully professional and there’s no time for play of unicorns *.

As Roger Belveal said on Quora: “Some people can play the piano and the banjo, but when they play them both at once it sounds really crappy.” (recommended read on this subject, also by Roger: Yes Virginia, About Unicorns).

Coding designers and designing developers don’t (usually) know nearly enough about the alien field to work efficiently. The result is unsatisfactory and as Jared Zimmerman, said on Quora: “(they) end up only coding what they can design or designing within their limited coding abilities.”. That’s definitely not something that anybody dreams of. We want perfect design and perfect code for our products, right?

All right… hold on. So should we completely separate both fields and let designers only understand design and programmers only understand code?

No way!

We want people of different fields to have common means of communication. We want them to understand each other.

Danilo Campos summed that up beautifully: “A designer can be more successful by understanding the technological constraints behind whatever medium he or she designs for. An understanding of how certain approaches are “cheap” either in terms of development time or in terms of computational practicality can ensure that a design makes it out of a mockup and into some shipping software.

And this is something that I strongly agree with. We don’t need coding designers and designing coders – we need people who can communicate, respect and understand each other.

Great developers and designers working together will grasp a little bit of knowledge from each other which will set foundation for efficient collaboration.

Say no to unicorns *. Appreciate differences.

/Marcin Treder

* An unicorn – designer who can design, code, manage projects and prepare thai food.

Click to see the full size it doesn’t get prettier, but certainly gets more readable.

The importance of copywriting in User Experience Design

Importance of copywriting in User Experience Design should never be underestimated. Whether you sell books, encourage people to read your blog, or try to persuade visitors to sign up to a b2b app – great copy is absolutely indispensable. Jeff Gothelf calls copywriting “The Secret Weapon of UX” and I simply couldn’t agree more.

Back in my UX Manager times I was dreaming about having dedicated, professional copywriter on my UX team. We’ve never found the right person, however I still think it’s the best solution for large organization. For smaller companies the only option is to encourage UX Designers to learn basics of copywriting, which really should be part of our skills.

Copywriting is a weapon that we should use mercilessly. Would you agree?

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Product Manager vs. UX Designer

I always advocate in favor of broad definition of User Experience Design practice. The one that contains not only UI design, but whole set of activities that lead to creation of a great product.

Here’s the definition from my recent ebook UX Design for Startups:

“User experience design (abbreviation UX, UXD) – A discipline focused on designing the end-to-end experience of a certain product. To design an experience means to plan and act upon a certain set of actions, which should result in a planned change in the behaviour of a target group (when interacting with a product).

A UX designer’s work should always be derived from people’s problems and aim at finding a pleasurable, seductive, inspiring solution. The results of that work should always be measurable through metrics describing user behaviour. UX designers use knowledge and methods that originate from psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science.

When you’re designing an experience, you are in fact planning a change in the behaviour of your target group. You’ve found out their problem and you’re trying to destroy the burden using design methods.

User experience lies at the crossroads of art and science and requires both extremely acute analytical thinking and creativity.”

Planning, measuring, building, validating – that’s pretty broad set of actions, but this is what, I believe, have to be done to create stunning UX Design. The question that’s often asked is the role of Product Manager in that picture. If UX Design is responsible for the product, what Product Manager is responsible for?

I’ve heard from couple of well respected UX Designers, that currently Product Development and User Experience Design are almost the same and in the lean future they actually should become the same. UX Designers are expected to understand business objectives (couldn’t agree more!), be really team oriented (collaboration is crucial!) and guide product through iterations (we should be great at measuring behaviour and acting upon results!).

Is there anything left for Product Managers? Well, in my opinion yes and no. It all depends on the type of organization.

For a small startupish teams UX designer and Product Manager can be the same person. UX designer should well understand business goals, users needs and should be focused on delivering an amazing product. Product done through ongoing, efficient, collaboration with other specialists.

If there’s not a lot of dealing with stakeholders, marketing is done in a guerrilla style, sales are limited to simple activities, financial part of the product is rather obvious, strategy doesn’t need to be adjusted to corporate strategy etc. there’s no need to bring on board additional person. Small team can deal with most of the problems on their own. In fact this how we work at UXPin.

However if there’s an ongoing need to coordinate work of different departments (sales, marketing), dealing with stakeholders is overwhelming, strategy is as complex as whole organization, marketing is a challenge, engineering team is massive… – there’s definitely place for a Product Manager. PM, in this environment, uses his understanding of the target group and the product, to make sure the train is going in the right direction.

Things mentioned above shouldn’t be done by UX Designer. The danger of loosing focus on the design will be too great.

I’m wondering what’s your opinion?

Not so long ago (though in pre-UXPin times), I was working as UX Manager. That’s a great position to be. Taking care of interfaces intertwined with taking care of the team of talented designers.

I was constantly thinking about skills great UX designers possess and ways of enhancing these skills among my people.

Let me share with you what skill-set I had (and still have) in mind.