When you spend your days in the land of code and databases, it’s easy to approach projects with the tools on hand. But your users aren’t robots and they won’t be thinking about how you’ve structured the database tables or constructed your queries. This talk will review a three-step process for stepping out of the developer mindset to approach things from your user’s point of view. Learn to build better products, really connect with your users and identify new opportunities.
There are volumes of articles about how designers need to better understand development. You’ve probably seen dozens of them yourself. Developers go to great lengths to tell designers how they should name and organize their Photoshop documents, how things should (or shouldn’t) overlap, which font or icon libraries to use, even going so far as to request they learn many development skills themselves so that they can understand the hardships developers face.
What most of these articles fail to realize is: this is a two-way street.
Developers also need to understand some baseline design principles. Developers should be familiar with basic design language, user experience and interaction design, user interface fundamentals, and even basic design theory. Just a little bit of knowledge in the design domain can go a long way in building products that surprise and delight customers and users, and even further in forging strong and successful relationships with quality designers.
Whether you’re a developer or a designer looking to gain a better footing, you can learn a lot from this session. session.