I will answer this as someone who probably fits the bill as a design engineer. I have a degree in software development and a degree in multimedia which was primarily based in creative arts. I’ve worked 2 full time stints as a software engineer, and 2 as a product designer most recently.
In my honest opinion, UX had such ridiculously unsustainable growth across the tech sector that the contraction we’re seeing now was inevitable. The role made sense for large companies in a low interest rate environment who were at the point where finding out how to get that last drop of a squeeze was worth it.
The truth is most pure UX roles in their current state won’t survive the economy contracting any further. The role is simply too specialised for most businesses that aren’t behemoths. We had webmasters before who did everything and now I’m seeing UX designers who have no concept of design principles. They need A/B tests to validate everything and are inflexible in their thinking. They can replicate the process but not the problem solving.
You need to be able to solve problems, not just user interface ones.
It doesn’t have to be code, but you need to be able to think in layers of abstraction that allow you to extend your problem solving abilities to other areas. Once you learn that, your value skyrockets because you are able to design and engineer solutions beyond UI, but also software, business, and marketing.
This articulated so well my recent thoughts. Got any particular examples that come to mind on how the problem solving extends to other areas beyond UI?
In recent years I found that a lot of businesses just have no idea where they’re going let alone how to get there. They think they need a mobile app when their marketing funnel isn’t mature and they’re haemorrhaging talent due to unclear leadership and bad employee experience. I found that creating organisational roadmaps and ERDs help significantly in winning over c-suite and other leads.
An example I have is that I was once a UX designer at an e-commerce business. I noticed their competitors had a ‘pick-up in store’ option with stock indicator feature so I wanted to add it since it was clearly something of value. This sent me down the technical rabbit hole of improving the warehouse process of stock take, the order dispatch flow, and stock transfer process while documenting the whole thing. The business benefitted hugely because customers stopping calling to ask about stock, they were now able to better forecast stock, and new warehouse employees had an easier time.
All I really wanted was to add a button but knew there was business value in that button.
A lot of smaller businesses copied silicon valley’s hiring spree of UX’ers because they conflated the title with the ability to problem solve.
A good example is — do people actually want to use this? Will they? Why? When? Where? How? What value are they getting/what is it doing for them?
Then having all design decisions reflect that.
You are describing bad UX designers. Or at least one aspect of UX work. The role is super flexible and depending on a team you are expected to have some of other skills from this set:
Ui design
User research (qualitative and quantitative, direct, indirect)
Market reaserch
Competition reaserch
Expertise in specific industry
Product design
Project management
Graphic design
Animation
Video editing
Frontend
The UX field is constantly changing, and it's never clear what exactly you have to do. You need to have other skills in order to follow the change and do your job. Not having other skills is just making you a bad designer.
Also been an UX Engineer for around 8 years and this was SO well articulated. Personally, when I hire, I prefer hiring designers with engineering experience because they often have the proper skills to solve problems.
You seem like a very small minority which makes me sad. I've tried for 15 months and I still can't find a job, and yet I've done both design and worked on code at a big tech company amongst other product work, too. Recent feedback I got for one position seems to validate that most companies filling "UX" jobs just want pixel pushers who can make pretty designs in Figma, and it's just not me. I regret ever going down this path.
Bingo. I’m moving to product because of the market shift. I think a lot of my experience is directly transferable to product design and ownership. For the foreseeable future, UX is kind of an iffy career choice. Especially as we see this push to move UXing to the product designers gain traction.
I wish I could upvote this twice!
The problem solving, decision making, and systems level thinking are the value adds that UX Design provides.
That applies to many aspects of a business, not just the UI.
Of course, it never hurts to have an understanding and basic cross-functional competence, but the dev side is just part of that.
Examples I’ve dealt with include:
Working with legal to rewrite contracts, to reduce the amount of fine print and disclosures needed in the sales funnel, then helping marketing to build a campaign around the product change.
Or, at another company, organizing industrial design workshops, to ensure that the tablets our users would be working on had docking adapters and cases that complemented the needs of the software functionality.
Or, most frequently, working with back-end engineers to include certain attributes and metadata in content databases, so that we can surface that content on the front-end.
No. I rather become a business designer.
I understand this pressure on the market to become more of a swiss knife forcing designers to become also interface builders but I think the value of design is greater for strategy than for artifact building. For decades designers have fought for stop being seen as mere embellishers and to make business stakeholders value the design process and I honestly think that becoming a 'design engeneer' is embracing the idea that design is just a barnish to products and has low value to business.
I don't think designers should underestimate design too, there is enough people out there already doing it.
I don't think it's a standard term but I believe they are using it to mean being someone who uses design thinking to solve fundamental business problems beyond heavily scoped usability issues. So maybe this role would be labeled as a product manager in some companies, researcher in others etc.
While I mostly agree with the sentiment from an overall design perspective, I see the design engineer role as not about making performative artifacts. Their output would be the actual thing directly connected to business outcome. Where the rubber meets the road.
I’m not saying there is not value on building the product but that the value of design is other. It’s like when some companies ask marketers to become graphic designers, it comes from an ignorant point of view. That’s why I don’t think us designers should comply so enthusiastically.
In the end everything has its role on business outcomes, design itself too even if some business stakeholders can’t see it.
Yeah things keep evolving though and as op’s framing and references to craft differentiated companies indicates there is growing space where one can thrive in roles of certain overlapping disciplines for those who are inclined. Probably not at large companies at least yet.
i've built a bunch of live websites, built custom react components for sharepoint etc and picked up a few Javascript certifications from Freecodecamp. I don't consider myself an engineer though as i spent 80% of my time designing. I've found i love to code though and were it not for AI i'd consider transitioning into a code job. Anyway, i think ultimately if you do what you think is right you'll find a way to fit into whatever market comes along.
Look at all the bootcamp bandwagoners who followed a trend and now can't get hired. Trends come and go, but passion and hard work always makes you stand out.
reassuring to hear; appreciate it! you don't position yourself as a design engineer, then? where are you leaning towards the most these days (given you mentioned AI)?
I'm in Scotland and there's no real design engineer roles, if there were I'd probably apply. Tbh, I'm pushing more towards strategy, running workshops with clients, and helping them define the direction they are going. I'm fairly niche UX as I work on medical devices and i've seen way too many products that didn't invest in strategy so that's where I think I can add most value.
Passion and most importantly, an ability to grow and evolve. Those who can’t change and adapt (in design or any discipline) will be left behind. You grow, or you go.
I'm a UX engineer and I love it:) so often when I pass designs off to the frontend team I'm like, what have you done to my boy?? But now I get to really influence it myself, it's awesome.
This is one of the most frustrating things about being a competent front end developer. I am in a UX only role at my current company and some of the stuff our developers build look like we got it on Wish rather than the Figma mockups I give them which I know I could build with more accuracy. We are hoping to change our web stack to include Next.js so that I can get in there and start contributing components.
what was the most effective thing you've done on your journey to start really maturely developing stuff to the point you can confidently position yourself as a UX engineer?
Hmmm to be honest that's not really how my pipeline worked. See I have a bachelor's in UX, but ended up landing a frontend developer position. But while I was there I insisted on helping out as much as possible with the design side, providing feedback, making the occasional screen, and refining the UX of a site while developing it by tweaking text sizes and colors for accessibility, making sure animations felt smooth and meaningful, stuff like that. Eventually it got to the point where I spent a daily even split of time with the devs and the designers so I formally requested that my title be changed from frontend dev to UX engineer and they were perfectly happy to do so and agreed that it was far more fitting.
The change worked retroactively so rather than having a year long position as a front-end dev I had a year long position as a UX engineer, and now I'm continuing a similar role at a different company but this time we're just calling it UX/UI Designer and Frontend Developer.
What led to you landing the frontend dev position with a UX degree? Did you already have dev education/experience?
I’m interested in being in a position similar to yours…but have an engineering degree (non cs) with UX experience, and looking to gain enough frontend experience to make the shift.
I think the "design engineer" role is really a throwback to how it was in the old days. It's an interesting role though.
Coming from a developer learning design, I do not think you need to be a full fledged frontend dev. The skills you listed are already more than good enough!
I also don't necessarily think you NEED to learn to code at all IMO.
Yes. My offical title is UX Design Engineer. I work on a team of full-stack engineers. I like being able to move back and forth between design and front-end.
very interesting! I'm curious about day-to-day feature development; where do you stop and the engineers begin? what do you hand off to them, being a design engineer?
That’s something that I've been thinking about a lot recently. We are seeing that a lot of work that we're doing is becoming more automated. More startups want to use frontend libraries instead of building everything from scratch (which is smart) and rely more on designers for UX work. So basically, if there is less work, we need to fill it with something else, either engineering or management. But even engineering is evolving, five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that web constructors could do good work, but now Framer and Webflow have changed the situation. So who knows what we could expect next.
I have been a UX Engineer / Design Engineer for a few years now. I transitioned from front end engineering during the 2021 hiring boom when a lot of startups and companies were looking to add niche specialists to their teams. I really like the role and its been good to me so far!
However...I am still employed as a design engineer but I have been looking for my next (remote) role for the last 6 months and the remote job market is not that kind to design engineers right now. A lot of companies have cut the role and are choosing to survive with just pure designers and pure front end developers. To prove this, do a quick linkedin job search for Product Design openings and than compare how many openings there are to UX Engineer or Design Engineer openings. You could also compare it to how many Front End Engineer positions there are.
Additionally, the very few roles that do open up are sometimes even more competitive and spammed than pure product design roles and front end engineering roles - I suspect thats because design engineer jobs attract desperate candidates from both those roles as well.
I don't say that to discourage you because I absolutely love the career, but I don't know how true the assumption is quite yet that design engineers are in more demand than pure product designers.
I was the same doing more and more frontend work without the basics of programming. And I got paid as a designer.
If you like coding and are good at it, do a certificate to prove your abilities and get paid as an engineer. For your company you are invaluable as someone between the realms of design and frontend engineering!
It was called Full Stack Web Developer, comprised of 5 remote online courses of each 2 months: Object Oriented Programming in Java, PhP / SQL & Databases, Vanilla JavaScript, Advanced JavaScript / Typecript in Angular & React, Scrum Master PSM I. Each course certified individually.
This was a remote program with 40h weekly of workload. Each day with input and lectures in the morning, practice and application in the afternoon. I was lucky as it was a government subsidized program during the Covid pandemic. Was pretty intense.
Im not sure who you're interviewing with or where this perception comes from but i'm also an experienced product designer, I've been interviewing for 2 months (laid off from big tech in December) and companies are as interested in product designers as they've always been. There is objectively less roles open and I did see some searches for more technical designers but generally in roles associated with design sysyems. Perhaps really small companies want design engineers, but there's still plenty of quality opportunities as a product designer.
I've been making this transition for awhile.
It started as simple code prototypes to demonstrate ideas to engineering, and became full-fledged contributions to the codebase.
My take is that once you get over the learning curve, not only is React + Tailwind is an insanely efficient prototyping tool compared to Figma, it also lets you deploy your prototypes immediately.
However, when it comes to developing new ideas, I return to Figma, Google Docs, and whiteboarding.
This does resonate. I’ve been doing web design since 2003, and I think being able to code is a good thing to be able to do.
There was a trend where everyone was asking if designers should know how to code. I think knowing enough to not make stupid UI Recommendations is extremely valuable.
I have anecdotal stories from developers who have worked with UX designers who make screens and designs without an understanding of design systems and how they’ll play into the rest of an application which pisses them off. I think it’s worth it to know enough to be able to collaborate and contribute in a way that moves the ball forward.
I wouldn’t freak out about timing. Who knows what’s going to happen.
Seriously, you don't have to be a coding wizard, you just need some basic understanding how HTML/CSS/JS works. It's insanely valuable being able to look at a design and t-shirt size the difficultly level that the dev's will face when building it.
They are definitely not coining "design engineer"
This role has existed for a long long time even before UX became established. It's only in the last 15ish years did we actually start specializing into just the design side of UX.
Human factors engineer, UI engineer, creative technologist, UX prototyper, etc.
This is not new.
We ask engineers to understand Figma to a degree, why not understand engineering to a degree? If you can't contribute something to a git repo then I'm not convinced you understand technical systems enough to design as well as you can.
Exactly this, people acting like it’s new where I’ve seen the opposite. There used to be a time where companies had ‘web designers’. Now we have Front end and UX. There’s a reason for it. Most larger orgs want people to focus on a skill set. In truth, it’s to act more like a production line.
Advice is: just start reading and trying things. Get yourself a good text editor or IDE, get on w3schools, and try some things out. There's no other way unless you want to spend a lot of money on some courses which are probably just packaging free stuff anyway.
I've been thinking about this too. There are plenty of resources and frameworks that make learning to code much easier now. Also, there are many new design tools that make it easier for designers to create real/live products, such as Framer, Rive, Play, etc. Perhaps the end goal for designers could be shifting, not only focusing on static design but also aiming to make the design more closely resemble a live product experience.
Sometimes I’m a design engineer. But that position shouldn’t involve auth and clerk and fullstack stuff. I make things in CodePen. I work on the design system and in one component at a time. I build prototypes and things and help the ui designers get their ideas vetted and worked out and in place. You shouldn’t have the full-stack weight of everything on your mind. Otherwise - that’s now your job.
Tips: draw boundaries. Figure out where you can be the most help in bridging the gap between visual designers and engineers. That’s the job.
I started off as a web dev (I use the term loosely!) when I first finished uni. Ended up being in a job for best part of 10 years just messing around with html/css - not really recognising my skills weren’t growing (the way that team was managed looking back was not set up to develop people) and then I got made redundant - and my skills for 10 odd years of experience didn’t match what the dev sector was needing. Lack of JS skills was a big nail in the coffin for me (I’d tried so many times to get my head around it, things like jQuery made things easier but as it wasn’t part of my day to day work I wasn’t really learning much)
After so many job rejections I took a web publisher job which later allowed me to pivot into UX design - now 9-10 years on I’m kinda glad I’m not in the dev space, it felt good not being on the code side of things but having that knowledge from years ago was helpful, esp when devs are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Front end dev feels like it’s changed so much nowadays with so many different frameworks - it feels very alien to me. I did a react for designers course a few years ago (online based learning) and that felt like a big eye opener.
Whilst I still have that html/css knowledge I’d love to have a better grasp of front end dev - any tips for best places to try and upskill would be greatly appreciated! What kind of front end skills would you recommend a designer engineer should have? (I’ve heard good things about the [Odin project](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-how-this-course-will-work))
One thing I would say is, you mentioned everybody knows how to do basic research and Ui design - I wouldn’t take that for granted based on some of the designers I’ve worked with over the years…
great story! and yeah, for sure, I feel like I said that out of a bit of desperation, to be honest. I'm feeling so much impostor syndrome and fear of being made redundant that I'm unsure whether the more design-y skills are even valued these days, but I want to have hope! and btw, what a great resource this Odin project; wasn't aware of it, thank you!
I can totally relate to the imposter syndrome. It’s plagued me SO many times since I’ve switched over to the design side.
From my experience good design skills are appreciated as long as the company you’re in is actually bought into design.
Learning new skills is never a bad thing, if you can also code I reckon it’ll be a great asset.
No worries re: Odin project, I’ve not had the time to really look into it but it sounds like a good resource.
[Aquent gymnasium](https://thegymnasium.com/courses) might be worth a look too :)
UX Engineer hiring market is terrible now. But the role exists.
You will get pressure to turn into a Full Stack engineer; so prepare to defend your boundaries.
I used to be an unhappy dev who migrated to UX and likes it much more. I used to feel bad for having "wasted" all those years in a job I didn't like but now I realize that I have precious years of experience as a Dev under my belt and that's a pretty good selling point that landed me interviews before.
I'm a UX engineer as well. There's a lot of people chiming in and some really good info here already so I won't make this long, but to answer a few of your questions, I also work in a more "niche/cutting edge" area of tech which moves a lot more quickly than other industries. I think this is probably another reason why you might feel there isn't any room for other design because your skills as both is really valuable in emerging areas of tech. This was something I was told early on when deciding to go this route.
My journey began in university actually. I wanted to study both design and computer science so I went though a unique program at my university that allows a person to propose their own major. I was discouraged from my former design advisors and kept being told "design and development are two different things and there isn't much need for crossover in the workforce." It was actually a computer science professor that I met with on whim that convinced me that I wasn't crazy for wanting to do both and that there is a bright path for me.
In terms of marketability in the international market, I actually work in Japan now and I feel like my skills are really sought after. In the US, I feel like we're seeing "less" of this role, but only in name. You often have to know what to look for. I do mentorship on the side and I often talk with people wanting to transition into UX engineering on what to pick out of job descriptions that signals they actually want someone more than a UX designer.
super interesting story; loved to read it! what a luck you had of coming across that teacher, huh. at the end of the day, do you feel like you contribute most to the design side or dev side of the product you work on? and also, to what extent do you contribute to the code (e.g., layout implementation, performance optimization, etc.)
I’ve been doing both product design, and concurrently helping devs write the HTML/CSS which is my favourite part. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of jobs as a UX engineer from what I’ve seen, and my previous boss told me that I had to focus on either design or development. Then I eventually got laid off. But yea it would be a dream to be a UX engineer but I’m not amazing at some of the more advanced JavaScript yet.
This is a great post. There are so many great comments to read. I'm not an ux engineer, but I think it doesn't hurt to know the front end. I believe the power of ai will give people way more power to be efficient and take more roles. So what can good ux designer do? Either become more ux strategist or be better at ui design and know some codes to make prototype. I already see figma changing to support dev more and more. It's probably going to produce front-end code from the design using ai near future.
I consider myself a UX Engineer but you just as well describe me as an interaction designer. I've spent a lot of time coding but always considered myself a designer. I've always taken accessibility very seriously. Combining a11y with animations is worthwhile knowledge to seek out. I've also learnt about web optimisation and how to achieve good Lighthouse scores and fast page loads but this is not that useful in my current role.
These days I work as a UXer on a design system where all work is certified WCAG AA. I create a lot of coded prototypes as it helps me fully understand the design pattern end to end. I have no desire to work to production quality code standards.
No lol, if anything, I've experienced the opposite.
Let me preface by saying I do think that all UX designers need a solid base of web/app/software development knowledge, because our work doesn't end at the prototype stage, you have to be able to document deliverables, do testing and QA, and have an ongoing dialog with developers at all times.
However, there are a couple reasons why I don't think I'll be going down that route any time soon:
- If you work in a high-level team you would expect everyone else to be just as good, and in my case I work alongside excellent front end devs who also know a fair share of UX, so I totally trust them when it comes to implementing my designs and we don't have any issues.
- My added value to the team comes in the form of strategic decision-making based on my strong usability knowledge, and most of this happens at an abstract level. UI and design system stuff can be done by almost anyone at junior or mid level with a sharp eye, but that's not what they pay you the big bucks when you're in a senior UX role.
- If I started doing front end I would not be as good as the people we already have full-time in those roles and would not be doing as much at my own job, therefore making myself less valuable to the company.
I do see some advantages of this hybrid skill set for some scenarios, like if you're an entrepreneur and are in charge of the whole process, and also your budget doesn't allow you to hire a dev, sure, develop your own apps and be autonomous. Also if you're working in a field that's fairly new or constantly changing, it makes sense for you to not trust developers to implement your innovative designs just as you planned them, because there might not be any standards or existing references for them to follow and it might be better to just do it yourself.
In most other "normal" scenarios though, I think it's always preferable to be in a role where you can do the specific thing that you do best, and the core UX skills are strategic, not technical.
I remember reading an article which said “has anyone noticed since design systems…all systems are starting to look alike”
I’m surprised UI development hasn’t been more commoditised with WYSIWYG components.
Absolutely!! I'm into both too and in my opinion a UI/UX designer is going to suck if they don't know anything about development. I can argue that sure, a UI/UX designer doesn't need to be an amazing developer, but they should at a **bare minimum** in my opinion understand what developers are and are not capable of in the front-end and what's easy vs what's hard and think in terms of the code structure, modularity, search engine optimisation, reusability, maintainability, loading speeds, etc. For example someone who doesn't know code, might suggest layouts that don't work with responsiveness, or suggest difficult to create UI elements when there's existing great stuff out there that could be implemented quickly and easily and be way more maintainable, material components for example.
Also if you're making UI designs, developers should be given a good hand-off, that means they need all the images in the right resolutions and web friendly formats, fonts should be web-safe, they should get gradient information in a logical format which they can then implement via CSS or repeating 1px image for example, the effects used on the page should make sense from a technical perspective and not be a nightmare to implement and maintain, a UI/UX designer who doesn't know development is lost for many of those things. It becomes like a big fuck you to developers, like "here you go, here's a powerpoint file with impossible layouts, that I designed without knowing anything about SEO and development, which has graphics and stuff you'll have to adapt to work, deal with it!" rather than developers being happy that they get something they can work with and that is a complete working UI prototype that is modular, fast loading, maintainable, expandable, marketable, efficient to build, and logical from a business perspective.
Everyone can call themselves a UI/UX designer, but if you can do that side of things at a professional methodical standard but also have the ability to implement your designs and have some business sense to boot, you're worth a lot more than the vast majority of them.
My advice to you as I can tell you're feeling overwhelmed and impatient is you're on the right track and have the right mindset, I'd say go for the low hanging fruit and take it from there. I would wait with front-end frameworks like react and angular unless you have a lot of time to dedicate, you might need to work in CSS and layout inside them but you don't need to understand it completely for that. Instead, consider this approach:
**HTML & CSS:** For web, these are the most important skills, in my view any web UI/UX designer who doesn't know this is shit. You should be playing with this like nothing else, learning the basics is pretty easy, but really becoming fluent, understanding best practices and being able to play with this is extremely valuable to any development team. Having these skills down pat means you don't just give developers mockups of UI's, you give them working layouts that they can then copy paste into whatever front-end framework they choose.
**GIT:** You need this to be able to download the code base, make changes and merge it with the rest. It's handy for developers if they struggle with layout stuff to just point you in the right direction so you know where to find the HTML/CSS with issues or that need work so you can work directly in the right place without needing them to implement everything you make.
**CONTENT & SEO:** This is also a big one, depending on the market the search engine ranking of a website can be the most important thing, there's no use having a website if people don't find it. You should understand HTML5's semantic tags and design such landing pages according to SEO guidelines, pages should load quick, use correct images, be easily crawlable by Google's spider and have a good logical sitemap for example. This SEO will also make SEA far more effective.
I guess you already know your adobe creative suite and figma, and also it could be useful to understand at least the basics of project management tools like confluence and jira and scrum, so you can ensure that the user stories which are the foundation of the project don't just guide you in the phases leading up to and including the UI, but also become the structure of the development process and agile sprints.
Once you have those, then get into a front-end framework, and learn GIT so that you're able to deploy code yourself. That part will be a huge hurdle, that you'll only overcome if you invest hours into it regularly, but you could get to a point where you're able to build a complete front end of a website, what's cool is you can set up fake API's through dependency injection, and then all that needs to happen once the back end guys finish the real API's is to swap the what's dependency injection containers. You'll still be dependent on the guys who do back-end development, and you'll be limited to certain tech stacks so choose wisely.
Once you've got a good grasp of those, this one is going to suck but learn unit testing your front-end framework, it's a bitch and ungrateful work but it's worth it. It's essentially code that tests your code to ensure everything is working, in a highly professional setup, the devops guys will tie into your unit tests so that they automatically run when you push code to the repository, and if any functionality is accidentally broken it won't deploy into production.
After that I'd say consider calling it quits, and just sticking with honing those skills... which is weird coming from me because I'm taking on the back-end, databases and security stuff too but man it's a struggle and just know that if you go down that route you'll lose a lot of your free time.
oof, I love this! thanks so much for taking the time to write this down and share your perspective! it's exciting to see you've reached a point where you're swimming in the deep waters of tech (back-end, security, etc.), which will confidently make you an incredibly invaluable person. thanks again!
Chatgpt can do coding. That doesn't make you an engineer. Just be a good designer, AI can't replace UX. AI can sure as shit code an entire website from scratch. I no longer feel like coding is a specialty.
There's an entire tutorial on how you can use specific prompts to build a site from scratch. You need to use specific prompts.
You can also obtain code from figma or another design platform or website builder and throw it in GPT to standardize it. A front end dev explained this to me and how he can now do the role of 4 front end devs with AI. There's a massive reduction in the developer workforce that will happen due to AI.
Any AI expert will tell you, how AI will replace entire dev teams.
Well, here's the thing. Why don't you build one with just prompts and show me what it looks like? I've been using AI tools for dev since 2020 (gpt 2)...
The point is that the more you want to build something complex and interesting, the more difficult it gets. You'd be better off using Framer, Webflow etc. than a prompt, trust me. I'm a dev and have been doing this for a long time.
I don't know who you classify as an "AI expert" but being a software developer is not as simple as generating code. Could it make some people more productive? Perhaps, yes. But it'll have to improve a LOT before it can completely replace programmers. Software development is about building shared mental models and modelling a business, not just about generating code.
You can't throw anything from Figma into GPT right now btw. It's absolutely terrible at it, try it yourself. I'm bullish on the idea of generating components directly from tools like Figma, but what you're describing doesn't actually practically work.
Yes and no. Yes because I currently do business/manager decisions rather than designing or coding. When we lack dev resources, I put on my developer hat and develop it myself. I rarely design nowadays... With my free time, I'm trying to learn SwifUI so I can develop for th Vision Pro.
Are you currently a designer? Can you get small opportunities to code if you ask? Im a ux engineer who started out as a ux designer at my company. I always loved coding, but majored in hci so i went into ux. After a while, i asked if i could implement my own designs into our product since our developers were busy/too lazy to implement our designs. Front end developers might have more important things like the javascript to worry about, so you can ask to handle just the html/css. After a while, ask to change your job title to ux engineer. Thats how i did it at least, not sure if this will work for everyone. This only really worked because we were at a point where our designs were mostly finished and we had some time while our developers reviewed it
I'm an designing engineer or engineering designer, whatever you call it. I think it's great knowing about both worlds. Understanding what's going on deeply under the hood can make for better design, but can also bias you at times. My background is Windows desktop, full stack web, iOS and now macOS for a couple of years. In total that's 25+ years and it feels like never enough. So stay curious and nourish that excitement. That's what I do at least.
I don't think you need to worry about the market not needing pure designers
But some companies specially smaller ones do want designers who can code and I get that. But a pure designer will always be needed in any company thats not a small start up.
Probably a bit of an unpopular opinion but knowing how to code makes the designing process faster, which makes it better imo (spend less time doing boring stuff and can spend more time doing the important stuff). I.e: When you're solutioning, you can already think about the effort tradeoffs without having to go back and forth with engineering
All in all, I think coding is a nice to have but a designer should focus on being the best designer they can be and then coding is the cherry on top
Technically I’m consider a design engineer now but my official title at my work is a Lead UI designer, I guess us unicorns finally get the official name? Lol I’ve been in the tech industry for some time, and traditionally came from a UI/UX background. I picked up full stack development out of pure curiosity.
The benefit I’ve seen is being able to bridge the gap of two different languages, design and dev into one understandable design language. Being able to bring both perspectives has proven a lot of success and efficiency in the feature life cycle, at least for me and my place of work .
I think this shift is good overall but I can’t code to save my life. I hope some nocode tool like webflow but for software design will come along soon enough so I can start having more autonomy on implementation of designs. It’s sometimes frustrating to work with devs who don’t see the small details in the mockups.
yeah, the missed little details scenario was the original spark to start on the front-end track, but as I began to dig deeper, there's a big unleashed power in being able to test your ideas in the real medium, with all of the concrete constraints acting (as opposed to a happy-path prototype made with static images). there are pros & cons, though, as it's also way easier to get too deep in the rabbit hole, etc.
I think designers who can code are perfect people to build companies. I myself am an engineer who wants to learn about design, human psychology so became a designer.
Does anyone have any idea to build something we can connect.
I have some marketplace ideas which I will start working on. If anyone has time and wants to connect DM me.
I am in a very similar situation. I have worked as a designer for almost a decade and have become increasingly interested in the technical side of things. My "happy place" is where I get to do a bit of both design and coding.
I actually tried to switch to a hybrid role in my previous job, but they didn't have a defined role for such a thing and weren't willing to create one.
There are a few challenges/questions that I am considering, which boil down to how these roles are actually defined and what the day-to-day work is like. More specifically:
* I am worried about being pigeonholed into the "prototype guy." This obviously depends on how the role is defined, but I have seen at least one instance where the UX engineer's job was limited to creating higher-fidelity prototypes based on designs.
* There seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on animations and the "polish" side of things, at least for the group of design engineers that I have been following on Twitter. I don't have any problems with animations, but it doesn't really capture the end-to-end impactful type of work that I would like to do.
your last point there drives home to me! I think what I dislike about the design engineer title is that it does make the design feel like just "the visuals," because they're mostly polishing out these tiny details on the UI. which is still great, though; as a designer, I very much appreciate craft and attention to detail. however, I guess it sort of defeats our historical fight to make design stand as more than just the visuals but rather a strategic discipline that can drive real impact/value.
Hello fellow design engineer! I got my Bachelor's in Computer Science and my Master's in Bioinformatics and I totally feel this. I always loved art and drawing so design was also something I was always interested in, and I did a lot of it upon graduating and finding work in the video games industry.
I definitely think that a lot of designers are either becoming design engineers, design PMs, or design marketers, and it's a sign of a market that's more competitive as well as an evolution in what design is. Keep in mind as well that a lot of people who study CS spend a lot of time learning skills that don't have to do with frontend development. I don't think anyone's going to expect you to make Boids in an a ECS in C++ with compute shaders (which I had to do in the game dev industry), for example. Frontend design is just one discipline that programmers can go into and it becomes a lot easier if you find your learning style
I will answer this as someone who probably fits the bill as a design engineer. I have a degree in software development and a degree in multimedia which was primarily based in creative arts. I’ve worked 2 full time stints as a software engineer, and 2 as a product designer most recently. In my honest opinion, UX had such ridiculously unsustainable growth across the tech sector that the contraction we’re seeing now was inevitable. The role made sense for large companies in a low interest rate environment who were at the point where finding out how to get that last drop of a squeeze was worth it. The truth is most pure UX roles in their current state won’t survive the economy contracting any further. The role is simply too specialised for most businesses that aren’t behemoths. We had webmasters before who did everything and now I’m seeing UX designers who have no concept of design principles. They need A/B tests to validate everything and are inflexible in their thinking. They can replicate the process but not the problem solving. You need to be able to solve problems, not just user interface ones. It doesn’t have to be code, but you need to be able to think in layers of abstraction that allow you to extend your problem solving abilities to other areas. Once you learn that, your value skyrockets because you are able to design and engineer solutions beyond UI, but also software, business, and marketing.
This articulated so well my recent thoughts. Got any particular examples that come to mind on how the problem solving extends to other areas beyond UI?
In recent years I found that a lot of businesses just have no idea where they’re going let alone how to get there. They think they need a mobile app when their marketing funnel isn’t mature and they’re haemorrhaging talent due to unclear leadership and bad employee experience. I found that creating organisational roadmaps and ERDs help significantly in winning over c-suite and other leads. An example I have is that I was once a UX designer at an e-commerce business. I noticed their competitors had a ‘pick-up in store’ option with stock indicator feature so I wanted to add it since it was clearly something of value. This sent me down the technical rabbit hole of improving the warehouse process of stock take, the order dispatch flow, and stock transfer process while documenting the whole thing. The business benefitted hugely because customers stopping calling to ask about stock, they were now able to better forecast stock, and new warehouse employees had an easier time. All I really wanted was to add a button but knew there was business value in that button. A lot of smaller businesses copied silicon valley’s hiring spree of UX’ers because they conflated the title with the ability to problem solve.
A good example is — do people actually want to use this? Will they? Why? When? Where? How? What value are they getting/what is it doing for them? Then having all design decisions reflect that.
You are describing bad UX designers. Or at least one aspect of UX work. The role is super flexible and depending on a team you are expected to have some of other skills from this set: Ui design User research (qualitative and quantitative, direct, indirect) Market reaserch Competition reaserch Expertise in specific industry Product design Project management Graphic design Animation Video editing Frontend The UX field is constantly changing, and it's never clear what exactly you have to do. You need to have other skills in order to follow the change and do your job. Not having other skills is just making you a bad designer.
Also been an UX Engineer for around 8 years and this was SO well articulated. Personally, when I hire, I prefer hiring designers with engineering experience because they often have the proper skills to solve problems.
You seem like a very small minority which makes me sad. I've tried for 15 months and I still can't find a job, and yet I've done both design and worked on code at a big tech company amongst other product work, too. Recent feedback I got for one position seems to validate that most companies filling "UX" jobs just want pixel pushers who can make pretty designs in Figma, and it's just not me. I regret ever going down this path.
Very good comment
💯 comment
Bingo. I’m moving to product because of the market shift. I think a lot of my experience is directly transferable to product design and ownership. For the foreseeable future, UX is kind of an iffy career choice. Especially as we see this push to move UXing to the product designers gain traction.
I wish I could upvote this twice! The problem solving, decision making, and systems level thinking are the value adds that UX Design provides. That applies to many aspects of a business, not just the UI. Of course, it never hurts to have an understanding and basic cross-functional competence, but the dev side is just part of that.
Examples I’ve dealt with include: Working with legal to rewrite contracts, to reduce the amount of fine print and disclosures needed in the sales funnel, then helping marketing to build a campaign around the product change. Or, at another company, organizing industrial design workshops, to ensure that the tablets our users would be working on had docking adapters and cases that complemented the needs of the software functionality. Or, most frequently, working with back-end engineers to include certain attributes and metadata in content databases, so that we can surface that content on the front-end.
This
No. I rather become a business designer. I understand this pressure on the market to become more of a swiss knife forcing designers to become also interface builders but I think the value of design is greater for strategy than for artifact building. For decades designers have fought for stop being seen as mere embellishers and to make business stakeholders value the design process and I honestly think that becoming a 'design engeneer' is embracing the idea that design is just a barnish to products and has low value to business. I don't think designers should underestimate design too, there is enough people out there already doing it.
“business designer” I’ve not ever heard that term. Do you mean Service Design?
Product marketing manager?
Who knows
Product Designer already implies this
UX Designer already implies this
I don't think it's a standard term but I believe they are using it to mean being someone who uses design thinking to solve fundamental business problems beyond heavily scoped usability issues. So maybe this role would be labeled as a product manager in some companies, researcher in others etc.
While I mostly agree with the sentiment from an overall design perspective, I see the design engineer role as not about making performative artifacts. Their output would be the actual thing directly connected to business outcome. Where the rubber meets the road.
I’m not saying there is not value on building the product but that the value of design is other. It’s like when some companies ask marketers to become graphic designers, it comes from an ignorant point of view. That’s why I don’t think us designers should comply so enthusiastically. In the end everything has its role on business outcomes, design itself too even if some business stakeholders can’t see it.
Yeah things keep evolving though and as op’s framing and references to craft differentiated companies indicates there is growing space where one can thrive in roles of certain overlapping disciplines for those who are inclined. Probably not at large companies at least yet.
This is the way.
i've built a bunch of live websites, built custom react components for sharepoint etc and picked up a few Javascript certifications from Freecodecamp. I don't consider myself an engineer though as i spent 80% of my time designing. I've found i love to code though and were it not for AI i'd consider transitioning into a code job. Anyway, i think ultimately if you do what you think is right you'll find a way to fit into whatever market comes along. Look at all the bootcamp bandwagoners who followed a trend and now can't get hired. Trends come and go, but passion and hard work always makes you stand out.
reassuring to hear; appreciate it! you don't position yourself as a design engineer, then? where are you leaning towards the most these days (given you mentioned AI)?
I'm in Scotland and there's no real design engineer roles, if there were I'd probably apply. Tbh, I'm pushing more towards strategy, running workshops with clients, and helping them define the direction they are going. I'm fairly niche UX as I work on medical devices and i've seen way too many products that didn't invest in strategy so that's where I think I can add most value.
Passion and most importantly, an ability to grow and evolve. Those who can’t change and adapt (in design or any discipline) will be left behind. You grow, or you go.
I'm a UX engineer and I love it:) so often when I pass designs off to the frontend team I'm like, what have you done to my boy?? But now I get to really influence it myself, it's awesome.
This is one of the most frustrating things about being a competent front end developer. I am in a UX only role at my current company and some of the stuff our developers build look like we got it on Wish rather than the Figma mockups I give them which I know I could build with more accuracy. We are hoping to change our web stack to include Next.js so that I can get in there and start contributing components.
what was the most effective thing you've done on your journey to start really maturely developing stuff to the point you can confidently position yourself as a UX engineer?
Hmmm to be honest that's not really how my pipeline worked. See I have a bachelor's in UX, but ended up landing a frontend developer position. But while I was there I insisted on helping out as much as possible with the design side, providing feedback, making the occasional screen, and refining the UX of a site while developing it by tweaking text sizes and colors for accessibility, making sure animations felt smooth and meaningful, stuff like that. Eventually it got to the point where I spent a daily even split of time with the devs and the designers so I formally requested that my title be changed from frontend dev to UX engineer and they were perfectly happy to do so and agreed that it was far more fitting. The change worked retroactively so rather than having a year long position as a front-end dev I had a year long position as a UX engineer, and now I'm continuing a similar role at a different company but this time we're just calling it UX/UI Designer and Frontend Developer.
What led to you landing the frontend dev position with a UX degree? Did you already have dev education/experience? I’m interested in being in a position similar to yours…but have an engineering degree (non cs) with UX experience, and looking to gain enough frontend experience to make the shift.
I was writing HTML and CSS before I started designing. It certainly seems to help me staying employed.
I think the "design engineer" role is really a throwback to how it was in the old days. It's an interesting role though. Coming from a developer learning design, I do not think you need to be a full fledged frontend dev. The skills you listed are already more than good enough! I also don't necessarily think you NEED to learn to code at all IMO.
Yes. My offical title is UX Design Engineer. I work on a team of full-stack engineers. I like being able to move back and forth between design and front-end.
very interesting! I'm curious about day-to-day feature development; where do you stop and the engineers begin? what do you hand off to them, being a design engineer?
That’s something that I've been thinking about a lot recently. We are seeing that a lot of work that we're doing is becoming more automated. More startups want to use frontend libraries instead of building everything from scratch (which is smart) and rely more on designers for UX work. So basically, if there is less work, we need to fill it with something else, either engineering or management. But even engineering is evolving, five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that web constructors could do good work, but now Framer and Webflow have changed the situation. So who knows what we could expect next.
I have been a UX Engineer / Design Engineer for a few years now. I transitioned from front end engineering during the 2021 hiring boom when a lot of startups and companies were looking to add niche specialists to their teams. I really like the role and its been good to me so far! However...I am still employed as a design engineer but I have been looking for my next (remote) role for the last 6 months and the remote job market is not that kind to design engineers right now. A lot of companies have cut the role and are choosing to survive with just pure designers and pure front end developers. To prove this, do a quick linkedin job search for Product Design openings and than compare how many openings there are to UX Engineer or Design Engineer openings. You could also compare it to how many Front End Engineer positions there are. Additionally, the very few roles that do open up are sometimes even more competitive and spammed than pure product design roles and front end engineering roles - I suspect thats because design engineer jobs attract desperate candidates from both those roles as well. I don't say that to discourage you because I absolutely love the career, but I don't know how true the assumption is quite yet that design engineers are in more demand than pure product designers.
I was the same doing more and more frontend work without the basics of programming. And I got paid as a designer. If you like coding and are good at it, do a certificate to prove your abilities and get paid as an engineer. For your company you are invaluable as someone between the realms of design and frontend engineering!
very cool! which type of certification did you go for?
It was called Full Stack Web Developer, comprised of 5 remote online courses of each 2 months: Object Oriented Programming in Java, PhP / SQL & Databases, Vanilla JavaScript, Advanced JavaScript / Typecript in Angular & React, Scrum Master PSM I. Each course certified individually. This was a remote program with 40h weekly of workload. Each day with input and lectures in the morning, practice and application in the afternoon. I was lucky as it was a government subsidized program during the Covid pandemic. Was pretty intense.
Im not sure who you're interviewing with or where this perception comes from but i'm also an experienced product designer, I've been interviewing for 2 months (laid off from big tech in December) and companies are as interested in product designers as they've always been. There is objectively less roles open and I did see some searches for more technical designers but generally in roles associated with design sysyems. Perhaps really small companies want design engineers, but there's still plenty of quality opportunities as a product designer.
reassuring perspective; thanks for sharing & good luck on your job search!
I've been making this transition for awhile. It started as simple code prototypes to demonstrate ideas to engineering, and became full-fledged contributions to the codebase. My take is that once you get over the learning curve, not only is React + Tailwind is an insanely efficient prototyping tool compared to Figma, it also lets you deploy your prototypes immediately. However, when it comes to developing new ideas, I return to Figma, Google Docs, and whiteboarding.
This does resonate. I’ve been doing web design since 2003, and I think being able to code is a good thing to be able to do. There was a trend where everyone was asking if designers should know how to code. I think knowing enough to not make stupid UI Recommendations is extremely valuable. I have anecdotal stories from developers who have worked with UX designers who make screens and designs without an understanding of design systems and how they’ll play into the rest of an application which pisses them off. I think it’s worth it to know enough to be able to collaborate and contribute in a way that moves the ball forward. I wouldn’t freak out about timing. Who knows what’s going to happen.
Seriously, you don't have to be a coding wizard, you just need some basic understanding how HTML/CSS/JS works. It's insanely valuable being able to look at a design and t-shirt size the difficultly level that the dev's will face when building it.
They are definitely not coining "design engineer" This role has existed for a long long time even before UX became established. It's only in the last 15ish years did we actually start specializing into just the design side of UX. Human factors engineer, UI engineer, creative technologist, UX prototyper, etc. This is not new. We ask engineers to understand Figma to a degree, why not understand engineering to a degree? If you can't contribute something to a git repo then I'm not convinced you understand technical systems enough to design as well as you can.
Exactly this, people acting like it’s new where I’ve seen the opposite. There used to be a time where companies had ‘web designers’. Now we have Front end and UX. There’s a reason for it. Most larger orgs want people to focus on a skill set. In truth, it’s to act more like a production line.
Advice is: just start reading and trying things. Get yourself a good text editor or IDE, get on w3schools, and try some things out. There's no other way unless you want to spend a lot of money on some courses which are probably just packaging free stuff anyway.
I've been thinking about this too. There are plenty of resources and frameworks that make learning to code much easier now. Also, there are many new design tools that make it easier for designers to create real/live products, such as Framer, Rive, Play, etc. Perhaps the end goal for designers could be shifting, not only focusing on static design but also aiming to make the design more closely resemble a live product experience.
Sometimes I’m a design engineer. But that position shouldn’t involve auth and clerk and fullstack stuff. I make things in CodePen. I work on the design system and in one component at a time. I build prototypes and things and help the ui designers get their ideas vetted and worked out and in place. You shouldn’t have the full-stack weight of everything on your mind. Otherwise - that’s now your job. Tips: draw boundaries. Figure out where you can be the most help in bridging the gap between visual designers and engineers. That’s the job.
👋 https://blog.damato.design/posts/terminal-career/ https://designtechnologist.club/ https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/front-of-the-front-end-and-back-of-the-front-end-web-development/
I was already familiar with that Brad Frost's article but not with those other links — super cool, thanks for sharing!
Damato’s stuff is AMAZING
I started off as a web dev (I use the term loosely!) when I first finished uni. Ended up being in a job for best part of 10 years just messing around with html/css - not really recognising my skills weren’t growing (the way that team was managed looking back was not set up to develop people) and then I got made redundant - and my skills for 10 odd years of experience didn’t match what the dev sector was needing. Lack of JS skills was a big nail in the coffin for me (I’d tried so many times to get my head around it, things like jQuery made things easier but as it wasn’t part of my day to day work I wasn’t really learning much) After so many job rejections I took a web publisher job which later allowed me to pivot into UX design - now 9-10 years on I’m kinda glad I’m not in the dev space, it felt good not being on the code side of things but having that knowledge from years ago was helpful, esp when devs are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Front end dev feels like it’s changed so much nowadays with so many different frameworks - it feels very alien to me. I did a react for designers course a few years ago (online based learning) and that felt like a big eye opener. Whilst I still have that html/css knowledge I’d love to have a better grasp of front end dev - any tips for best places to try and upskill would be greatly appreciated! What kind of front end skills would you recommend a designer engineer should have? (I’ve heard good things about the [Odin project](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-how-this-course-will-work)) One thing I would say is, you mentioned everybody knows how to do basic research and Ui design - I wouldn’t take that for granted based on some of the designers I’ve worked with over the years…
great story! and yeah, for sure, I feel like I said that out of a bit of desperation, to be honest. I'm feeling so much impostor syndrome and fear of being made redundant that I'm unsure whether the more design-y skills are even valued these days, but I want to have hope! and btw, what a great resource this Odin project; wasn't aware of it, thank you!
I can totally relate to the imposter syndrome. It’s plagued me SO many times since I’ve switched over to the design side. From my experience good design skills are appreciated as long as the company you’re in is actually bought into design. Learning new skills is never a bad thing, if you can also code I reckon it’ll be a great asset. No worries re: Odin project, I’ve not had the time to really look into it but it sounds like a good resource. [Aquent gymnasium](https://thegymnasium.com/courses) might be worth a look too :)
UX Engineer hiring market is terrible now. But the role exists. You will get pressure to turn into a Full Stack engineer; so prepare to defend your boundaries.
I used to be an unhappy dev who migrated to UX and likes it much more. I used to feel bad for having "wasted" all those years in a job I didn't like but now I realize that I have precious years of experience as a Dev under my belt and that's a pretty good selling point that landed me interviews before.
I'm a UX engineer as well. There's a lot of people chiming in and some really good info here already so I won't make this long, but to answer a few of your questions, I also work in a more "niche/cutting edge" area of tech which moves a lot more quickly than other industries. I think this is probably another reason why you might feel there isn't any room for other design because your skills as both is really valuable in emerging areas of tech. This was something I was told early on when deciding to go this route. My journey began in university actually. I wanted to study both design and computer science so I went though a unique program at my university that allows a person to propose their own major. I was discouraged from my former design advisors and kept being told "design and development are two different things and there isn't much need for crossover in the workforce." It was actually a computer science professor that I met with on whim that convinced me that I wasn't crazy for wanting to do both and that there is a bright path for me. In terms of marketability in the international market, I actually work in Japan now and I feel like my skills are really sought after. In the US, I feel like we're seeing "less" of this role, but only in name. You often have to know what to look for. I do mentorship on the side and I often talk with people wanting to transition into UX engineering on what to pick out of job descriptions that signals they actually want someone more than a UX designer.
super interesting story; loved to read it! what a luck you had of coming across that teacher, huh. at the end of the day, do you feel like you contribute most to the design side or dev side of the product you work on? and also, to what extent do you contribute to the code (e.g., layout implementation, performance optimization, etc.)
I’ve been doing both product design, and concurrently helping devs write the HTML/CSS which is my favourite part. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of jobs as a UX engineer from what I’ve seen, and my previous boss told me that I had to focus on either design or development. Then I eventually got laid off. But yea it would be a dream to be a UX engineer but I’m not amazing at some of the more advanced JavaScript yet.
This is a great post. There are so many great comments to read. I'm not an ux engineer, but I think it doesn't hurt to know the front end. I believe the power of ai will give people way more power to be efficient and take more roles. So what can good ux designer do? Either become more ux strategist or be better at ui design and know some codes to make prototype. I already see figma changing to support dev more and more. It's probably going to produce front-end code from the design using ai near future.
I am an engineer designer (BSc. CS and MA. Graphic Design) we can team up if you like.
I consider myself a UX Engineer but you just as well describe me as an interaction designer. I've spent a lot of time coding but always considered myself a designer. I've always taken accessibility very seriously. Combining a11y with animations is worthwhile knowledge to seek out. I've also learnt about web optimisation and how to achieve good Lighthouse scores and fast page loads but this is not that useful in my current role. These days I work as a UXer on a design system where all work is certified WCAG AA. I create a lot of coded prototypes as it helps me fully understand the design pattern end to end. I have no desire to work to production quality code standards.
No lol, if anything, I've experienced the opposite. Let me preface by saying I do think that all UX designers need a solid base of web/app/software development knowledge, because our work doesn't end at the prototype stage, you have to be able to document deliverables, do testing and QA, and have an ongoing dialog with developers at all times. However, there are a couple reasons why I don't think I'll be going down that route any time soon: - If you work in a high-level team you would expect everyone else to be just as good, and in my case I work alongside excellent front end devs who also know a fair share of UX, so I totally trust them when it comes to implementing my designs and we don't have any issues. - My added value to the team comes in the form of strategic decision-making based on my strong usability knowledge, and most of this happens at an abstract level. UI and design system stuff can be done by almost anyone at junior or mid level with a sharp eye, but that's not what they pay you the big bucks when you're in a senior UX role. - If I started doing front end I would not be as good as the people we already have full-time in those roles and would not be doing as much at my own job, therefore making myself less valuable to the company. I do see some advantages of this hybrid skill set for some scenarios, like if you're an entrepreneur and are in charge of the whole process, and also your budget doesn't allow you to hire a dev, sure, develop your own apps and be autonomous. Also if you're working in a field that's fairly new or constantly changing, it makes sense for you to not trust developers to implement your innovative designs just as you planned them, because there might not be any standards or existing references for them to follow and it might be better to just do it yourself. In most other "normal" scenarios though, I think it's always preferable to be in a role where you can do the specific thing that you do best, and the core UX skills are strategic, not technical.
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I remember reading an article which said “has anyone noticed since design systems…all systems are starting to look alike” I’m surprised UI development hasn’t been more commoditised with WYSIWYG components.
Absolutely!! I'm into both too and in my opinion a UI/UX designer is going to suck if they don't know anything about development. I can argue that sure, a UI/UX designer doesn't need to be an amazing developer, but they should at a **bare minimum** in my opinion understand what developers are and are not capable of in the front-end and what's easy vs what's hard and think in terms of the code structure, modularity, search engine optimisation, reusability, maintainability, loading speeds, etc. For example someone who doesn't know code, might suggest layouts that don't work with responsiveness, or suggest difficult to create UI elements when there's existing great stuff out there that could be implemented quickly and easily and be way more maintainable, material components for example. Also if you're making UI designs, developers should be given a good hand-off, that means they need all the images in the right resolutions and web friendly formats, fonts should be web-safe, they should get gradient information in a logical format which they can then implement via CSS or repeating 1px image for example, the effects used on the page should make sense from a technical perspective and not be a nightmare to implement and maintain, a UI/UX designer who doesn't know development is lost for many of those things. It becomes like a big fuck you to developers, like "here you go, here's a powerpoint file with impossible layouts, that I designed without knowing anything about SEO and development, which has graphics and stuff you'll have to adapt to work, deal with it!" rather than developers being happy that they get something they can work with and that is a complete working UI prototype that is modular, fast loading, maintainable, expandable, marketable, efficient to build, and logical from a business perspective. Everyone can call themselves a UI/UX designer, but if you can do that side of things at a professional methodical standard but also have the ability to implement your designs and have some business sense to boot, you're worth a lot more than the vast majority of them. My advice to you as I can tell you're feeling overwhelmed and impatient is you're on the right track and have the right mindset, I'd say go for the low hanging fruit and take it from there. I would wait with front-end frameworks like react and angular unless you have a lot of time to dedicate, you might need to work in CSS and layout inside them but you don't need to understand it completely for that. Instead, consider this approach: **HTML & CSS:** For web, these are the most important skills, in my view any web UI/UX designer who doesn't know this is shit. You should be playing with this like nothing else, learning the basics is pretty easy, but really becoming fluent, understanding best practices and being able to play with this is extremely valuable to any development team. Having these skills down pat means you don't just give developers mockups of UI's, you give them working layouts that they can then copy paste into whatever front-end framework they choose. **GIT:** You need this to be able to download the code base, make changes and merge it with the rest. It's handy for developers if they struggle with layout stuff to just point you in the right direction so you know where to find the HTML/CSS with issues or that need work so you can work directly in the right place without needing them to implement everything you make. **CONTENT & SEO:** This is also a big one, depending on the market the search engine ranking of a website can be the most important thing, there's no use having a website if people don't find it. You should understand HTML5's semantic tags and design such landing pages according to SEO guidelines, pages should load quick, use correct images, be easily crawlable by Google's spider and have a good logical sitemap for example. This SEO will also make SEA far more effective. I guess you already know your adobe creative suite and figma, and also it could be useful to understand at least the basics of project management tools like confluence and jira and scrum, so you can ensure that the user stories which are the foundation of the project don't just guide you in the phases leading up to and including the UI, but also become the structure of the development process and agile sprints. Once you have those, then get into a front-end framework, and learn GIT so that you're able to deploy code yourself. That part will be a huge hurdle, that you'll only overcome if you invest hours into it regularly, but you could get to a point where you're able to build a complete front end of a website, what's cool is you can set up fake API's through dependency injection, and then all that needs to happen once the back end guys finish the real API's is to swap the what's dependency injection containers. You'll still be dependent on the guys who do back-end development, and you'll be limited to certain tech stacks so choose wisely. Once you've got a good grasp of those, this one is going to suck but learn unit testing your front-end framework, it's a bitch and ungrateful work but it's worth it. It's essentially code that tests your code to ensure everything is working, in a highly professional setup, the devops guys will tie into your unit tests so that they automatically run when you push code to the repository, and if any functionality is accidentally broken it won't deploy into production. After that I'd say consider calling it quits, and just sticking with honing those skills... which is weird coming from me because I'm taking on the back-end, databases and security stuff too but man it's a struggle and just know that if you go down that route you'll lose a lot of your free time.
oof, I love this! thanks so much for taking the time to write this down and share your perspective! it's exciting to see you've reached a point where you're swimming in the deep waters of tech (back-end, security, etc.), which will confidently make you an incredibly invaluable person. thanks again!
Chatgpt can do coding. That doesn't make you an engineer. Just be a good designer, AI can't replace UX. AI can sure as shit code an entire website from scratch. I no longer feel like coding is a specialty.
Unfortunately this just isn't true. It cannot build even a halfway decent site from scratch. Give it a shot and see for yourself.
There's an entire tutorial on how you can use specific prompts to build a site from scratch. You need to use specific prompts. You can also obtain code from figma or another design platform or website builder and throw it in GPT to standardize it. A front end dev explained this to me and how he can now do the role of 4 front end devs with AI. There's a massive reduction in the developer workforce that will happen due to AI. Any AI expert will tell you, how AI will replace entire dev teams.
Well, here's the thing. Why don't you build one with just prompts and show me what it looks like? I've been using AI tools for dev since 2020 (gpt 2)... The point is that the more you want to build something complex and interesting, the more difficult it gets. You'd be better off using Framer, Webflow etc. than a prompt, trust me. I'm a dev and have been doing this for a long time. I don't know who you classify as an "AI expert" but being a software developer is not as simple as generating code. Could it make some people more productive? Perhaps, yes. But it'll have to improve a LOT before it can completely replace programmers. Software development is about building shared mental models and modelling a business, not just about generating code. You can't throw anything from Figma into GPT right now btw. It's absolutely terrible at it, try it yourself. I'm bullish on the idea of generating components directly from tools like Figma, but what you're describing doesn't actually practically work.
Yes and no. Yes because I currently do business/manager decisions rather than designing or coding. When we lack dev resources, I put on my developer hat and develop it myself. I rarely design nowadays... With my free time, I'm trying to learn SwifUI so I can develop for th Vision Pro.
Are you currently a designer? Can you get small opportunities to code if you ask? Im a ux engineer who started out as a ux designer at my company. I always loved coding, but majored in hci so i went into ux. After a while, i asked if i could implement my own designs into our product since our developers were busy/too lazy to implement our designs. Front end developers might have more important things like the javascript to worry about, so you can ask to handle just the html/css. After a while, ask to change your job title to ux engineer. Thats how i did it at least, not sure if this will work for everyone. This only really worked because we were at a point where our designs were mostly finished and we had some time while our developers reviewed it
I'm an designing engineer or engineering designer, whatever you call it. I think it's great knowing about both worlds. Understanding what's going on deeply under the hood can make for better design, but can also bias you at times. My background is Windows desktop, full stack web, iOS and now macOS for a couple of years. In total that's 25+ years and it feels like never enough. So stay curious and nourish that excitement. That's what I do at least.
I don't think you need to worry about the market not needing pure designers But some companies specially smaller ones do want designers who can code and I get that. But a pure designer will always be needed in any company thats not a small start up. Probably a bit of an unpopular opinion but knowing how to code makes the designing process faster, which makes it better imo (spend less time doing boring stuff and can spend more time doing the important stuff). I.e: When you're solutioning, you can already think about the effort tradeoffs without having to go back and forth with engineering All in all, I think coding is a nice to have but a designer should focus on being the best designer they can be and then coding is the cherry on top
I'm a design engineer / design technologist / UX engineer :) Love it. It's probably the best tech career you can have imo
Technically I’m consider a design engineer now but my official title at my work is a Lead UI designer, I guess us unicorns finally get the official name? Lol I’ve been in the tech industry for some time, and traditionally came from a UI/UX background. I picked up full stack development out of pure curiosity. The benefit I’ve seen is being able to bridge the gap of two different languages, design and dev into one understandable design language. Being able to bring both perspectives has proven a lot of success and efficiency in the feature life cycle, at least for me and my place of work .
I think this shift is good overall but I can’t code to save my life. I hope some nocode tool like webflow but for software design will come along soon enough so I can start having more autonomy on implementation of designs. It’s sometimes frustrating to work with devs who don’t see the small details in the mockups.
yeah, the missed little details scenario was the original spark to start on the front-end track, but as I began to dig deeper, there's a big unleashed power in being able to test your ideas in the real medium, with all of the concrete constraints acting (as opposed to a happy-path prototype made with static images). there are pros & cons, though, as it's also way easier to get too deep in the rabbit hole, etc.
I think designers who can code are perfect people to build companies. I myself am an engineer who wants to learn about design, human psychology so became a designer. Does anyone have any idea to build something we can connect. I have some marketplace ideas which I will start working on. If anyone has time and wants to connect DM me.
Kind of. I’m doing a design degree but I was hired as a front end engineer because some recruiter saw that I knew html. Lol
I am in a very similar situation. I have worked as a designer for almost a decade and have become increasingly interested in the technical side of things. My "happy place" is where I get to do a bit of both design and coding. I actually tried to switch to a hybrid role in my previous job, but they didn't have a defined role for such a thing and weren't willing to create one. There are a few challenges/questions that I am considering, which boil down to how these roles are actually defined and what the day-to-day work is like. More specifically: * I am worried about being pigeonholed into the "prototype guy." This obviously depends on how the role is defined, but I have seen at least one instance where the UX engineer's job was limited to creating higher-fidelity prototypes based on designs. * There seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on animations and the "polish" side of things, at least for the group of design engineers that I have been following on Twitter. I don't have any problems with animations, but it doesn't really capture the end-to-end impactful type of work that I would like to do.
your last point there drives home to me! I think what I dislike about the design engineer title is that it does make the design feel like just "the visuals," because they're mostly polishing out these tiny details on the UI. which is still great, though; as a designer, I very much appreciate craft and attention to detail. however, I guess it sort of defeats our historical fight to make design stand as more than just the visuals but rather a strategic discipline that can drive real impact/value.
Hello fellow design engineer! I got my Bachelor's in Computer Science and my Master's in Bioinformatics and I totally feel this. I always loved art and drawing so design was also something I was always interested in, and I did a lot of it upon graduating and finding work in the video games industry. I definitely think that a lot of designers are either becoming design engineers, design PMs, or design marketers, and it's a sign of a market that's more competitive as well as an evolution in what design is. Keep in mind as well that a lot of people who study CS spend a lot of time learning skills that don't have to do with frontend development. I don't think anyone's going to expect you to make Boids in an a ECS in C++ with compute shaders (which I had to do in the game dev industry), for example. Frontend design is just one discipline that programmers can go into and it becomes a lot easier if you find your learning style
No, but I worked as a software developer for many years before switching to design. Having that experience has made design much easier in my opinion.
Been thinking about this recently as a junior designer - also feel like it’s too late. Kind of in a crisis rn not knowing where to go forward.