Be a better UX designer by understanding development aspects

Stand out from the crowd, make more complete UX designs and better design decisions by understanding development aspects

Created by: Krisztina Szerovay
Product designer

Created by: Gergely Szerovay
Developer

What Will I Learn?

• How to make better design decisions by understanding development fundamentals, technical constraints
• Knowing what is going on inside the computer is essential for great UX design work
• Understanding technical aspects will make you a better designer, even if you don’t have the chance to collaborate with developers
• Involving developers in your design workflow right from the start of the project adds a powerful new perspective to your UX work
• Forget the “Should designers learn to code?” question, designer-developer collaboration is not about learning to code
• How to get involved in developers’ activities (e.g. during implementation: testing, bug reporting)
• Understand the differences between online and offline apps, so that you can take into account users’ needs and context better
• How to represent real world objects & concepts inside a digital app (e.g. data types, data modeling)
• Better form design: what you should specify next to UI specs (e.g. user input's data type, max. text length)
• Learn algorithmic thinking so that you’ll be able to consider all cases, spot redundancies, remove inconsistencies
• How a form validation algorithm works, what the design implications are
• Performance is an important limitation, and your design decisions always impact it! (e.g. designing web applications)
• You should be involved in decisions about how to store data, e.g. you can tell what groups of data will be read or modified together and how often
• How to define logical relationships inside an app, e.g. “a user can have maximum 1 profile picture” is a rule you should define
• Design decisions affect risks, costs and development effort, e.g. custom code is usually more expensive than using an existing solution
• How to choose an appropriate existing solution, reusable component (e.g. map component: Google Map)
• How API’s work, why you should know what functions are provided by a given API (e.g. in case of a payment solution)
• How to ask better questions from developers, and how to educate them to ask better questions from you

Requirements

• There are no requirements necessary to enroll.

Target audience

• UX Designers
• Interaction Designers
• Product Designers
• UI Designers
• Service Designers
• Web Designers
• Freelance designers
• Designers working at an organization (whether it's a startup or an enterprise)
• Any designer who wants to learn about how developers work, and how to ask better questions from them
• Anyone who wants to improve the workflow of creating digital products and services (apps, websites, systems)
• This course is NOT for you if you want to learn how to code! This course is not about coding!
• This course is NOT for you if you are expecting a detailed, step by step walk-through for creating a digital product or service from the first stroke all the way to the first release! This course concentrates on development aspects, technical constraints, and designer-developer collaboration.