I underestimated the responsibilities of UI/UX designers
My initial views
For long I have viewed the job of UI/UX designers as one that ensures a clean
looking product with the best experience as possible. This is still true, but I
have never thought about the depth of work required to get the best results.
A case in point
I found myself working on the API of a booking feature for an app, Most of my
work was influenced by the mockups of the app, Unlike most bookings were you
have pre-created slots for users to choose from, this was the kind where there
are opening and closing times, which meant a user was allowed to pick any
starting to closing time between the opening and closing times. This was
represented on the mock-up as a simple time picker. For me, I just went ahead to
create an endpoint to accept bookings, cross-checking to prevent overlaps then
persist. From the frontend standpoint, things were not exactly ok. You see if
the user is allowed to select their prefered times they might end up receiving
error messages each time there are overlaps till they finally picked a free time
range, which is not the best experience. The next best solution was to populate
the time picker with available time slots, the challenge here is we might just
end up with a lot of time slots to scroll through.
The Ah Ah moment
This got me thinking, why is this not falling in place nicely, I mean as a
developer the only time you seem to have to jump hoops is when you try to mock
some natural world scenario, you know like calculating menstrual cycles,
timezones etc. There was something wrong. It took a while but it hit me, This is
not about implementation its design, This is not a problem for a time picker,
this is one that is best solved with something like a display calendar. All
booked times are spread and displayed on the calendar, this naturally reveals
unbooked slots then the user can pick empty slots. Simple and clean.
Final thoughts and my new view
The one thing I kept thinking about after was if I were a UI/UX designer how
would I get this right before it gets to the implementation stage? How do I
learn these things? Sure for something like the above case, I would spend time
learning about available inputs and when best to use them. But what about other
aspects of UI/UX? The only way to know the best option to go with sometimes
depends on thinking not only through the colour scheme, the user flow but also
aspects like data flow and **timeliness. **The commonest form of data flow
thought of are empty states and overflow of data(when to paginate), what about
that long list of available time slots, how long will it take a user to find the
perfect time to pick or how long till the server returns the entire time list on
picking a date and how can entire process of returning a list be avoided ?
Populating a design or mock with data reveals a lot of things that might be
overlooked and caught only during implementation because well that's usually the
only time you have test data going through the product. Imagine forgetting to
add country codes to phone numbers at the design stage and only realising you
need to add this when you get to the point of implementing SMS.
As I keep thinking about it, It becomes clear to me a better UI/UX is one that
considers the entire life of the app from development to growth. With
considerations like happy, sad, failed, successful paths along the way. Thinking
through the colours and product flow alone is not enough. The work of the UI/UX
designer is one that brings the product to life through imaginations prior to
implementation. Again this is something I have never given deep thoughts, maybe
many already know this but me, I never thought of it.
Top comments (1)
How cool that you share your thoughts about the profession from personal experience, it's appreciated!
Here is also a good post that talks about the profession of a UX designer, looking at the necessary skills and responsibilities of a designer in the process gapsystudio.com/blog/what-does-a-u.... I recommend this material for beginners.