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Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code

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By Jared Spool

May 31st, 2011

If you’re in a room filled with designers, bring up the topic of whether it’s valuable for a designer to also code. Immediately, the room will divide faster than Moses split the Red Sea. One side will tell you coding is an essential skill, while the other will vehemently argue how it dilutes the designer’s value.

Interestingly, it isn’t the designers who get to decide if coding is a valuable skill. It’s the hiring managers. And right now, based on today’s jobs market, it’s pretty clear where they stand. Many want to hire super designers—designers who can also code.

While hiring super designers has always been floating around, the real demand has come recently out of Silicon Valley startups. With a couple of high-profile design successes, like Apple and Mint.com, the investors and entrepreneurs in the Valley now have a new appreciation for the work of designers.

Startups, however, try to run as lean as possible, so they look for talent with a broad set of skills. The thinking among the Valley folk is, if they can get someone who does both, they can get their product from concept to ship with an ideal set of resources. Otherwise they’d have to hire two people. Or do without one.

We’ve proven for years that you can ship a product without a designer. Many companies have done that, and while it doesn’t make for a great result, it does ship. However, it’s much harder to ship a software product without a coder, if not near impossible.

That’s why, right now, there are dozens of startups looking to pay big bucks to find the coding super designer. The demand is high and those designers who have proven, practiced coding skills can demand a higher salary than those who don’t.

What about the non-startup portion of the hiring world? Right now, the established organizations find it easier to have larger teams with separate developers and designers.

Yet, that doesn’t make the designer that can code any less valuable to them. A team with two coding designers is more flexible and capable than a team with one non-coding designer and a non-designing developer. The flexible team can produce well-designed results better and faster.

Coding and designing are collections of skills. What we’ve learned is teams with a better distribution of skills, not segmented by roles, produce better results. Having a team filled with individuals who can both code and design will be more effective in the long run than a team where the skills are divided up.

If you’re a designer, you don’t have to learn to code. But if you do, and you get good at it, you’ll find more opportunities as time goes on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Careers, Design, Design Teams, Development, Hiring, Management, Team Management, User Experience, UX . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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66 Responses to “Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code”

  1. Tim Sheiner Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 2:45 pm

    I’d be interested to know if you could breakdown ‘designers who code.’ In other words, do you see an understanding of ranges of coding skills from markup/css to javascript to application level languages, etc?

  2. Dave Malouf Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 3:00 pm

    The other side of the “super” IxD is that they also need to be visual designers, too. What I like to call the Trinity designer. Startups REALLY want these. I think the other Super Designer Visual/IxD is more powerful to have, since you have to have engineering in other areas of the startup org. I think the request for “coding” skills is good, but w/o great (better) visual skills the start up is missing the point, IMHO.
    – dave

  3. Rahul Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 3:09 pm

    We call them “interaction engineers”. I’m one of them and there’s only 3 of us because we can’t find anyone else. What we do on a daily basis: user research, consulting on product strategy, usability testing, interaction design, front-end development, visual & graphic design (there’s a difference), copywriting, communicating with developers about features, etc. Being able to do all these things as one person is extremely valuable. It’s also made it possible for me to build a product with 1 engineer (who does front- and back-end engineering) as we don’t really need anyone else right now.

    Interaction engineering is the future of the job, and I don’t work at a Silicon Valley startup but at a Dutch web agency. Silicon Valley (and companies like 37signals) are just ahead of the game.

  4. Paul Daly Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 3:18 pm

    I’d really like to see some data on ‘willing to pay big bucks’; maybe UPA could add that into their salary survey. I told one recruiter his job description was looking for 3 people (UX/VD/coding)–are they going to pay me 3 salaries? No, I think they just want it on the cheap and hiring managers don’t know what the difference is.

  5. Zack Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 3:40 pm

    Is that part of the new trend calling folks that do HTML/CSS of their own design “Developers.”

    In the general sense, people that possess the ability to write fantastic app level code rarely have the fine eye of a great designer, and the reverse is also true.

  6. Handcrafted Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 3:44 pm

    The real reason the Valley wants designers who can code: they’re better…

    Jared Spool over at UIE just published an article about “why the Valley wants designers who can code“. In it, he asserts that startups in Silicon Valley want to keep teams small and therefore look to combine critical roles within a single p…

  7. UrbanImpresionist Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 7:07 pm

    Great article. I have seen this happening (unfortunately/necessarily) at smaller companies looking for UI designer/developer …aka unicorns. The problem is that for a designer to also try to keep up with a multitude of coding programs (which change and improve so frequently nowadays); something’s got to give …and that’s going to be design skills.

    It is quite unlikely for anyone to be outstanding at both. Quality design requires keeping prototyping skills up to date, trend following, research, usability testing, coordination with other disciplines, etc. The best a company can realistically want, and ought to seek out, is a designer with with merely a good understand of coding and dev skills as we, not just PMs, are often the glue that keeps projects cohesive. Otherwise they’re really just getting devs average design skills at best IMO.

  8. Norcross Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 11:09 pm

    I’m a developer who can do design, within limits. I think that it’s too broad a brush to paint one a “designer” or “developer”. I can handle CSS, color scheming, typography, and framework layout, but ask me to design a logo or ask me what shade of blue would be best and I’ll look at you like you just showed a dog a card trick.

    I think each side (dev / designer) should have some knowledge of each other’s work, but to expect one to handle both really well isn’t realistic.

  9. Jin Yang Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    Could you clarify what you mean by “coding?” Coding typically means mark-up languages(HTML/CSS) to a web designer. Every web designer who’s worth a check should do that already, and do it well.

    If you mean “programming,” as in .NET, PHP, Ruby etc, then I can see it’s more rare. Having back-end programming skills definitely makes a designer more valuable to the team as your article suggests.

  10. Tami Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    I have to disagree with those doubting that someone can do both well. There are people that can do both, and many of the extremely talented industry leaders do both. I do both, and I do both well. I know others that do both, and do them well. But they are a rarity, and I think that’s what the article is about.

    One thing I say as a designer/coder is that the way I design, I’m already thinking of the html and css in my head. Perhaps not exactly, but a general feeling of how the overall page structure is going to be. This is an area where the designer that can code really shines – seeing what can and will be accomplished from the very early stages of the design process and ensuring it comes out that way when its coded.

    Handcrafted hits the nail on the head with the matrix reference. Yes, we see all the way through the code.

  11. Laura Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    There are an interesting range of opinions on this very topic.

    I’m a print & web designer by training. I’ve also been happy to find that I’m a natural fit for UX – I want to know how something works, why it works, what effect it has on a user, and how it could be improved to make people’s experiences better. I also love math and am learning development – yes, “just HTML and CSS”, but also JavaScript and other programming languages. I make sure the things I create on any level are accessible for everyone, including web users with disabilities.

    It’s easy to think that a person can only be really good at one skill and so-so at the other, or only pretty good at all three skill sets. I’ll be the first to admit that my strongest skill set lies on the design side, but I’ve also been designing roughly three times longer than I’ve been coding.

    I recently had an interesting conversation with Jared about being skills-based versus role-based. (And Jared can expand on this better than I can.) If you strictly define yourself by the role you play in a company or start-up, it’s likely that you’re limiting your own potential. You have no room to grow your potential in other areas if you only repeatedly do the one thing you do really well, whether it be design or customer service or UX. If you want to limit yourself to one role, that’s completely fine.

    But if you’re open to improving your skills in the not-so-perfect areas you’ll strengthen your own abilities and the teams you work with. It takes more work, and it takes communicating with the people who are better at some skills than you. If you seek to be skills-based instead of roles-based, you and your teams will most certainly benefit.

    Doesn’t that sound like a better deal for everyone?

  12. Eric Reiss Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 12:04 am

    Employers always want people with the broadest range of skills, so this isn’t exactly “breaking news”. Personally, I far prefer designers who understand the business goals of what they are designing and can therefore contribute more than just aesthetically shuffled pixels to W3C standards.

  13. Bryan Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 12:31 am

    Huh. Coding practices are constantly evolving, but design fundamentals will never change.

    If a visual designer has any respect for the medium in which they work, they will pick up the skills necessary to communicate their principles to software engineers and system architects. Right now that means understanding HTML/CSS at a minimum, and a pastiche of web languages if you want to be a “rockstar” designer. Your rockstar designers know how to make something look and feel great, and out of necessity have learned how to make things work. I wouldn’t expect a developer to have the same insight into the communication arts as I would expect a designer to have.

    I think the more attractive option is a hardcore software engineer who can also be a UX generalist. This theoretical creature has been bred to make things work, and their curiosity has led them to think about how things can work better. Their biggest advantage is the ability analyze and iterate, and not get hung up on the same things that visual designers typically do. I simply wouldn’t build my company on code written by a designer.

  14. Fahd Butt Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 1:16 am

    I call myself a “User Experience Engineer” so I don’t have to pick a side in the “designer” or “developer” camp. We are engineering experiences for users, and it begins with the napkin and ends with whatever-is-needed-to-deploy. We want our experience to be delightful and sometimes that means moving divs 1-pixel at a time. It also means we want our code to run fast so the user isn’t waiting.

    I think the drawback of being a generalist is that your knowledge is shallower than the specialists. It helps in communicating between the different roles but there are times where you’d be lost in the area you aren’t as strong in. Therefore its a role that is more important at an early stage of a startup (and especially a founder) where you aren’t developing for scale or designing for all use-cases. As the startup grows, a generalists role is akin to a Product Manager that can still get his hands dirty.

  15. UrbanImpressionist Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 1:19 am

    * Pretty sure by coding the author is alluding not to HTML and CSS (which most designers do know) but as Jin mentioned to more complex things I’ve been seeing in listings such as: AJAX, Javascript/actionscript, JQUERY, PHP, .ASP/.NET, Coldfusion, etc.

    More of my argument against a dual role (again not talking more than HTML & CSS) and speaking from experience, said dual role individual is going to get bogged down for hours or even days on issues and learning curves wasting far more (valuable) time getting technical issues resolved than a season dev would (for instance, on a PHP widget to function correctly). That’s going to hurt both dev and design and cost of the project. Penny-wise; pound foolishness IMO.

  16. Pravinn Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 1:46 am

    Startups needs people who can wear multiple hats.
    Here you don’t have testers, You don’t have Technical architects you don’t have a reception or they don’t even have proper office space. Company owner might pick up a calls & answer, they might be a technical geek themselves. So why they will need a roles. Main concept of the startups is to make a workable prototype and market them to get first, second, third round of funding.

    After getting a good round of funding they will think of setting up the roles and have money to pay.

  17. Quora Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 5:20 am

    Do companies need designers who can code?…

    Why or Why not? Based on Jared Spool’s post: www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/05/31/why-the-valley-wants-designers-that-can-code/…

  18. Jenifer Tidwell Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    I can’t disagree with Jared’s basic point, having built a career out of doing both design and engineering! But in practice, there are some thorny problems with it. I found that when I tried to be both a designer and engineer/coder, I ended doing a lot more engineering and a lot less design than I wanted to do. That happened in several organizations, large and small, and all in spite of my best efforts to change the balance.

    I think part of the problem is that engineering skills are, in the end, valued more than design skills.

    I explain more in my own blog post:
    “Designers that code: a response to Jared Spool”

  19. Tucker Williams Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    I found that those in this blended role design to their ability to code the thing rather than rely on an expert with a deep understanding of software development to create a solution just as elegant as the experience design. I’m sure there are a few out there who do both amazingly well, but I bet they’re working all the time – if that’s what works for you then go for it.

    Now, making a statement that coding will open up more opportunities, while not completely inaccurate, is a bizarre point of view because of technology itself. I don’t need a coder to do a lot of the work anymore because coders/engineers figured out that we don’t need new code all the time, hence the invention of software platforms, modularization, software tools, etc. And it’ll just continue to improve because of people who love to code! I love you all by the way… thank you for the passion and spirit you put into the things that allow we designer types to focus on what we love to do too.

    What’s more, there are many opportunities outside of production for designers who seek to improve their ability to think critically and strategically about the design of products.

  20. Designers who can code « Yeah, that's been Yuk-ed Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 1:24 pm

    [...] understand and sympathize with the arguments for and against designers who can code. For me it boils down to question of what I to focus on [...]

  21. Kevin Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 1:43 pm

    I put myself through college getting a computer science degree while working as a web and print designer, and like a lot of programmers, I started young, around 9 years old. After college, all my job roles have been “designer who can code”, including 5 years at 2 silicon valley startups.

    Based on those experiences, I’ve moved to a pure design role, and only write code for interactive prototypes or for personal projects outside of work. I also tell younger designers that it’s a waste of time to expand their skillset to learn to code, beyond HTML/CSS, and not because you can’t be good at both. You absolutely can, if you’re willing to work hard.

    The issue is that most companies looking for designer-developers don’t really value design. They’re looking to get design on the cheap, and that usually means UX is not a core part of their product vision. From a career perspective, you can’t grow as a UX designer at a company like that – you’ll have few opportunities to do your best work, and that will be reflected in your portfolio. I think you have to weigh the short-term gain of a (slightly) larger salary with the long-term hit to your career prospects.

    Some people might say “But startups have to be cheap, they have limited resources!” Which is true, but a lot of startups are very picky about the devs they hire and try to get the highest caliber they can – and they aren’t cheap. In the end, you spend money on what is valuable to you, and if you think spending money on UX is a wasteful luxury like hiring a receptionist, that means UX isn’t core to your product vision.

  22. Xandre Lima Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 3:03 pm

    I work in a company specialized in the financial market, online trading and banks and we have many great designers, developers, htmlers, information architects, usability analysts, system architects, etc., all separated. The thing is, almost all of our colleagues are super professionals in their own area, I mean, they know more than the average professional in their own field. The problem is, if you find a designer who is also a developer, you won’t have this kind of expertise on your team ‘cos he/she only knows a bit about design and a bit about coding. Maybe it’s enough to put your product on the run, but you will be embracing risks. This happened to the Farmville project. Farmville was not the first social game to use a farm. They saw a terrible app where people build farms and they took the idea into a new level. Start yps must think about this, if you put your product for everyone to see it and someone has a better team to develop something similar starting from your idea, you’re doomed…

  23. User Interface Engineering: Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code | Usability Counts Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 5:32 pm

    [...] An excerpt: We’ve proven for years that you can ship a product without a designer. Many companies have done that, and while it doesn’t make for a great result, it does ship. However, it’s much harder to ship a software product without a coder, if not near impossible. [...]

  24. Jonathan Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 6:08 pm

    Mr Spool is stating that hiring managers with highly constrained budgets will seek to hire people who can do more than one job. That’s hardly news. In fact you’ll find the same thing applies in many other disciplines (some people can do both accountancy and compliance, marketing and PR, SEO and SEM).

    But the entirely separate question of whether anyone can DO good UX design and production-quality markup is easy to test. Look at companies that have enough money to hire for separate roles and see what they do. You will see they choose to separate the roles. It would be much more interesting to know what Mr Spool would have to say in a blog post called “Why The Fortune 1000 Wants Designers Separate From Coders”.

    PS: I’ve just noticed he has now tweeted that he thinks people can be both good UX designers and good coders. This is from a man who I assume does neither in his daily life. Of course, he’s entitled to his opinion, but I’d say that’s a bit odd since he appears not to be saying it on the basis of any demonstrable facts at all.

  25. Jonathan Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 6:34 pm

    (Replying to my own post, first sign of madness)

    I’ve just written an apology to Mr Spool for the fact that I didn’t read all his post, and see he does partially address the point I raise (although still without citation for his assertion that hybrid teams do better). I then submitted my comment without the spamcheck, got an error message, hit the back button, and lost my entire comment.

    FFS.

    Anyway, in summary: he’s probably right for startups and small companies. But once a site reaches a certain level of complexity, hybrid roles will have to specialise because there’s not enough hours in the day to maintain quality and handle the work. This is the same for those that do both SEO and SEM, accounting and compliance, and marketing and PR.

    (copying to clipboard this time before I hit submit this time)

  26. Dale Sande Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 6:41 pm

    I don’t think that designers who can code their UIs are unicorns. We exist. But, I’d say they are rare cause the industry has made them rare. For to long the role of the presentation layer developer has fallen to the app developer or engineer. After all, if you can code .NET, Ruby, PHP, etc … HTML/CSS should be child’s play, right? And I have found that personally to be vary far from the truth.

    In my experience you can code and design but there will be challenges. You won’t be an awesome ‘developer’ and you won’t be an awesome ‘designer’ either. You will be a ‘designer who can code’ as the article puts it.

    What is really lacking is a clear way to communicate a design to the engineers. Comps, layouts, PSD files, etc … don’t work in my mind. I feel that what this article is speaking to is that companies are looking to fill that communication gap and having a ‘designer who can code’ is one way to do that.

    I personally advocate for the role of the presentation layer engineer. This is a coder that can interact with designers and developers. Create assets that address the concerns of the designers while providing tools that the engineers can use to create the final app UI. This was the reason behind me embracing concepts like modular web development, OOCSS and lead to the creation of axle.dalesande.com

    In a tart up you do need someone who needs to know HTML, CSS, at least jQuery and I would advocate for LESS or SASS as well. But as far as languages, I don’t think that they need to be .NET, PHP or Ruby masters. But if you know how to interact with the surface of the language, you can add a lot of value to a team.

  27. Jamie Hoover Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 8:12 pm

    Digital designers that can’t code are just as ignorant as those that can’t draw. Architects must be multi-disciplinary or we would be forced to dwell in buildings that were either ugly or fell down on our heads. HCI schools should be modelled more closely to that of architecture.

    If I wanted to be a specialist, I’d work in a factory.

  28. mrbmc Says:
    June 1st, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    Teams deliver. Not individuals. Don’t label people by their skills.

  29. Coding for Designers | Normative - Design for Devices and the Web Says:
    June 2nd, 2011 at 10:08 am

    [...] a few blog posts) about the need for designers to learn some sort of coding. Jered Spool posted Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code, Michael Angeles responded on Konigi, and there has been much tweeting and commenting on the [...]

  30. Weblin Avatar » Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code » UIE Brain Sparks Says:
    June 2nd, 2011 at 11:22 am

    [...] hier den Originalbeitrag weiterlesen: Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code » UIE Brain Sparks [...]

  31. Why does the Valley want designers that can code? Because the Valley doesn’t understand what designers do. | Jackson Fish Market Says:
    June 2nd, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    [...] Spool recently posted about “Why the Valley wants designers that can code.” Basically, he makes the good point that hiring managers at startups are always looking for [...]

  32. tommyr Says:
    June 2nd, 2011 at 3:37 pm

    There’s nothing unique to UX here. This is the same dilemma as for any job / speciality.

    Irrespective of how skilled or multi talented they are if you hire just one person to write front end code, do the visual design, run ux tests etc. there’s a limit to how much time they can spend on any one of these. The same person in a job where they can dedicate 100% of their time to one of those tasks will do a better job at it.

    If you’re a startup or you can’t afford more employees then you need a generalist and you have to accept you’re only getting part of a designer. If you can afford more then it’s largely down to your organisation and the way you’re projects are run whether you choose to have specialists or generalists. There definitely comes a point though when a team’s large enough or the product complex enough that it makes sense to have someone who’s more specialised.

    Some companies are guilty of trying to do UX on the cheap by employ

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