Adjusting the Developer Perspective
As a developer, your day-to-day work will be heavily influenced by the business and is – more often than not, in my experience, working as a developer both in-house and in external agencies – viewed as a production line that churns out the code. The goal
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Adjusting the Developer Perspective As a developer, your day-to-day work will be heavily influenced by the business and is – more often than not, in my experience, working as a developer both in-house and in external agencies – viewed as a production line that churns out the code. The goal of that production line is to deliver against the business goals, with a concentration on efficiency, delivering to release windows, and can, in some cases, be treated as a commodity by product owners or the organization at large. This is a symptom of the lower levels of UX maturity we discussed in Chapter 2. There can be hostility toward user experience and what it entails, simply as the organization has not yet come to the point at which it values the input of the users regarding the software they are creating, prioritizing their own internal goals above all else, and favoring self-referential design. This kind of organizational culture – common in long-standing organizations that are still working toward digital transformation – places developers in silos, preventing any kind of exposure to the user and to user feedback, robbing any member of a development team of the chance to create some semblance of empathy toward the user and their needs. Developers effectively “ran the show” when it came to building digital solutions for businesses a few years back. Software development was much more of a dark art, shrouded in mystery for those who were not so technologically minded. More recently however, as new technology and digital approaches are adopted, and are ever- increasingly becoming an integral part of everyday workings of organizations throughout the world, the metaphorical fog that had previously surrounded the internal application of software has dispersed. The personal adoption of new technologies, especially through mobile devices, has quickly changed the understanding of what is possible with
© Westley Knight 2019 W. Knight, UX for Developers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4227-8_4
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Chapter 4
Adjusting the Developer Perspective
the technology that is now widely available. Non-developers within your organization now have a much greater understanding of what they want in regard to their digital projects, but not necessarily how to go about achieving those goals. Just as businesses are now looking to take control of their futures by embracing the possibilities of digital advances, developers must now look outside of the confines of writing code to embrace a wider view of what it means to build applications, websites, and other software. This chapter will look at how developers need to adjust the way they look at their role in creating digital products, and that they must expand their horizons in order to stay relevant in the evolving and maturing environments that will only grow more focused on user experience in the future.
Developer Decisions Impact the User Experience Although a front-end developer will have the vast majority of their work seen and utilized by the users, it must not be underestimated how
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