Dev UX

When you think about user experience and the people who are specializing in this field, you probably wouldn’t think of backend developers to be part of it. But why not? The experiences we have with a product aren’t solely created by it’s design and animations – all the big and small gears working in the background are also important shapers of the overall user experience. We believe that every member of our team can contribute to a good UX – even we backend developers are coding with the user’s needs in mind – we call it DEV UX.

What’s it all about

But what is DEV UX you may ask yourself. It’s neither mind-blowing nor brand-new or something you have to learn like a new programming language. In my opinion it all starts in your mind and  attitude towards your work and todos. You aren’t just programming in order to tick off todos but helping create a product which the user will fall in love with. Albeit working on better performance or proper error handling and testing – everything’s translated into action while trying to empathize with the user. Furthermore in this case “a user” doesn’t necessarily has to be the person who uses your product but also your teammates and fellow developers. We developers at Liechtenecker are always involved from the beginning of the product creation cycle to add precious contributions to the conceptual and design phase.

You aren’t just programming in order to tick off todos but helping create a product which the user will fall in love with

DEV UX in action

To make things a little bit clearer for you I will give you two examples of key ingredients for good Dev UX:

Every developer knows (or at least should know…) that speed and good performance are crucial. When we are optimizing our product’s performance we aren’t trying to limit loading times to a random number given by whomever but rather try to optimize with the user’s needs and expectations in mind. You can hardly do anything wrong with fast loading times but knowing why you are fighting against those surplus milliseconds can push your motivation to the next level. This is an important issue for every part of a project, so therefor working together with other backend- and the frontend developers is necessary – which leads me to the next example: style guides and/or coding standards.

When a developer has to work with code that was written by someone else it’s difficult to understand the program when there are no coding guidelines. A common language always helps to better understand each other and saves a lot of time. Furthermore adhering to defined rules may also result in cleaner code which reduces possible sources of errors and that’s good for everyone, even the users who’ll use your product.

Summary

Of course there are more things to tell about Dev UX but I think that’s enough to get acquainted to the matter. I tried to show you two aspects of DEV UX: one that is directly addressed to the enduser (performance) and one that also implicates your teammates (common language and style guides).

And like I said earlier – there’s nothing new or extraordinary about DEV UX – it’s an attitude, how you code and the ability to be empathic towards your users and your team members. And of course it makes every developer’s work better :). General opinion states that developers aren’t very social and/or empathic – but that’s totally rubbish like we hopefully all know.