Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

DEVELOPERS ARE THE MASTERS OF THE MEDIUM
I’ll never forget the first time I saw one of the painter Yves Klein’s signature monochrome
blue works. Klein had played around with the ultramarine blue pigment that’s part of
every painter’s tool kit to enhance the way it would appear on canvas. He learned how to
blend it with a synthetic resin that allowed the pigment to retain its vividness of color
much better than the traditional resin. The effect was so striking that Klein painted a series
of works devoted purely to the color, which is named International Klein Blue, and they
went on to become his most famous pieces. If you’ve never seen one, I encourage you to
take any opportunity you may have to do so; the experience is intense.
What’s relevant about this for UX is that Klein understood the medium of paint so
well, down to the details of its chemical composition, that he was able to do something
groundbreaking that was also incredibly simple and basic.
Good developers understand the medium of the digital space so well that they can
help you achieve your goals for a product by finding ways to play with the medium. It’s
awesome to me how some of them can mold and shape a site to fulfill a design I’ve given
them, and often to significantly improve it. In a recent research project I was working on,
a developer colleague of mine took a motion prototype I’d given him and brought it to life
but gave it properties I hadn’t even thought possible, using animation physics similar to
the spring physics the Yahoo intern helped me work with. Developers can also be of
enormous help in solving performance problems with a design. One of the foundational
standards of good code is that faster is better, and developers can work wonders to speed
up elements of your design, like interactions and page transitions. Performance is also
defined by the quality of the interaction experience, such as whether a scroll down a page
feels smooth or jerky.
Front-end engineering that affects UX isn’t always so obvious. After I left the
Journal, an update to the flagship iPad app came out that allowed users to put a URL
bookmark on the home screen of the iPad that opened the app. This feature released the
app from the clutches of the dreaded Newsstand folder. UX research had shown that
sequestering an app icon in a folder greatly reduced the chances of a user opening it, and
Apple had done just that by introducing Newsstand for all newspapers and magazines. My
former development team had figured out a work-around, and when I saw the new release
I cheered them for the achievement. This was a great UX feature that only someone with
knowledge of how the system worked could have come up with. Being a master of the
medium leads to so many opportunities for crafting an experience.
Front-end developers aren’t the only ones who can produce engineering that
enhances an experience. Back-end engineers can do a great deal to apprise you of features
you can include in a design. Sometimes just exploring systems options is an effective way
to generate ideas, and only the handler of the medium the product is built from can
comprehend all the options available. Back-end engineers can help you understand what is
possible and how it can be implemented.
During my graduate school years at the School of Information and Library Science,
the most valuable classes I took were on databases, information systems, and metadata.
Metadata in particular was an interesting subject, introducing me to the seemingly endless