Developers: Stop using the user as an excuse
Translated by Thiago Santana.
Originally published in Brazilian Portuguese at UX Collective BR.
In 2010 I joined the web development market as a front-end developer and, since then, one of the words I hear the most is “user”. The user has gained importance over time in the process of thinking about the product. Nowadays, I consider it fundamental to work together with a UX team when the goal is to build a high-quality product.
Having worked at Huge Inc. (a digital agency that was founded upon the user experience concept), I learned a lot about the UX area. As a developer, I always tended to think that designing a screen wasn’t much of a secret. For example: to move to the next screen, all I had to do was to include a “Next” button. “How difficult is it to do this?” — I used to think. But after a few years working closely with excellent UX teams and professionals, I realized how important this experience was, and how we can only achieve a really good product when we are taking UX seriously.
For a long time, I considered the user to be an excuse for not developing something that I found complicated or that I simply did not agree with — and I criticize myself for that opinion. Believe me: many developers think the same way. Maybe not consciously, but when I gave it a thought, I started observing others. I realized that opinions like that were much more common than I first imagined. I’ve heard many times people saying things like this: “If we animate this button we will impact the performance for the user”, “If the menu behaves differently we will have performance problems”, and so on.
The point here is: probably someone has already reflected on this demand, sometimes it has even been tested with a prototype, or maybe it is an experience based on the result of a real test with users — especially when this demand comes from the UX team. Just imagine how frustrating it is for someone who is interested in the experience they will get from the job hearing those kinds of things from a developer who is not going to produce — or not even to test — the idea, because that is not going to be good for the “user”. Today, thinking maturely about it, I would ask my past self: “What is your basis for saying such a thing?”, “Do you really think that it will be necessarily worse for the user just because you’ve found out that this will have an impact of 0.1 seconds when loading the page?”. It is important to think that many times these 0.1 additional seconds to load the page is the price to solve a much bigger and important usability problem. There is little point in saving 0.1s in loading the page if the user will take five more minutes to perform a task.
The secret is to find a balance between performance and usability.
In my point of view, it is very important to really think about the user experience and to work alongside a UX team to propose the best solutions. One of the main tasks of the developer is to deal with challenges and try new solutions from project to project. Often a solution will not work, and it will be worse for the user in a determined project, but it may work very well in another one. That could be explained by changes in the target audience, in the technology, in the scenario, and so on. So before stating that something is not possible, experiment first and test possible paths. Just the fact of not immediately denying an idea, however, complex it may be, opens a door of infinite possibilities. Maybe at the end of the path, you realize that it was not possible indeed, but the process is important for the developer and the UX team to really understand what doesn’t work, why it doesn’t work and what options can work instead.
If you don’t have a UX professional on your project, it’s important to demonstrate to stakeholders the importance of having someone working with UX. Rather than answering a particular demand with something like — “This will definitely impact the user experience in a negative way because it will take longer to load” –, always try to think something closer to: “I think this can be negative for the user, but we will never be sure if we don’t have someone thinking about the user’s experience and working on processes that will give us that answer with much more assertiveness”.
Thanks to Caio Vaccaro and Thiago Santana
