Why knowing design can make you a better front-end developer?
In the current tech industry, companies are composed of multi-disciplinary teams, and that is great, but, sometimes this can bring some drawbacks. If teammates that work closely speak different languages, e.g. programming vs design, communication can turn tricky and the work can get slower.
What’s the matter?
When designers expose the UI design to programmers, they do it using the language and words they know. If we as programmers don’t know those words and that language, our understanding of the UI design will be limited by that ignorance. This may result in our code not working as it should or the UI does not match with the design. In addition, there are situations where we as developers need to explain to the designer that some behavior is not feasible to do in code, and sometimes we try to explain this using programming and tech terminology that can confuse even our colleagues, of course, this will end with our designer confused and the work can get affected.
What can we do?
This is where learning basic design becomes relevant. I’m not saying that we need to start a full degree in graphic and UI design, some basic knowledge is enough to avoid endless talks that result in nothing and to having more productive and faster chats with concrete results. Knowing some design principles such as alignment, hierarchy, balance, symmetry, contrast, and typography, can make a real difference, and in addition to that, it will raise our value as professionals. Think about it, everybody wants to work with someone who is easy to speak with. If the work gets done better and faster when you are involved, people will notice, and they will appreciate it.
But, what to do when we need to explain something to the designer by using programming terminology? The answer is simple: DON’T. Keep this in mind when talking to people, if what you are about to say can be understood only by someone who knows or studied programming, don’t say it. Instead, try to use simple words that anyone can understand. Doing it is a guarantee of better and more fluent communication. And remember, people want to work with someone with whom they can have good communication. The easier you make things for your teammates, the more you will get the job done.
So, if you consider you have bad communication with designers, this is the right moment to learn basic design, follow these tips, and communication in your work will surely improve.
See you in another story.
