Unlocking the Art of User Experience: The Power of Front-End Development

We contend that one of the causes of subpar design execution is the requirement for UX teams to be responsible for more than just design. We contend that design and development have never been more closely aligned than they are now with front-end development. In the field of consumer software, some products, including Apple’s iTunes, Intuit’s Mint.com, Facebook, and Twitter, have attained high prestige.

More designs that are delightful and also very usable can be found in the actual world than in the digital one. The problem is that amid a sea of shoddy designs, these few iconic examples of well-designed digital products are difficult to miss.

Each of these goods satisfies a pressing emotional need for the user, but they also each go above and beyond that. There are many factors at play when product teams provide poor user experiences. Sometimes engineering rejects ideas or is unable to construct transformative designs due to lack of expertise.

The Need for Front-End Development to Be Owned by the UX Team

Most people in the field of product development do not recognize the middle ground that front-end developers occupy. They hunt for chances to create fantastic user experiences or address user problems with creative designs, and they get ecstatic when they succeed in doing so.

The greatest front-end developers think and communicate more in design language than in technical jargon. Certain technical abilities are necessary for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Instead of rewarding people that excel at front-end development, most engineering organizations want to reward employees who increase their deep technology skills.

Great front-end developers often do not belong to Engineering’s inner circle, at least not in a cultural sense. Their front-end skills decline as they put more effort into back-end development.

The second justification has to do with ownership and our goal to be able to go from a concept to a fully functional front-end prototype as rapidly as possible so that users may validate it. If they report to User Experience, they will optimize for the user experience; but, if they report to Engineering, they will optimize their code to satisfy Engineering’s requirements.

If front-end developers report to User Experience, we can give them tasks and trust that they will work hard to achieve our UX goals.

When they work under a User Experience team rather than an Engineering team, front-end development teams create user interfaces that are more distinct and robust. Sincere frustration is felt by everyone involved in the conversation, including the User Experience, Engineering, and Product Management teams, when such disconnects are not resolved. They require additional time and negotiation, push back deadlines, and generally annoy everyone.

Under the direction of design leadership, designers and front-end developers who collaborate on the same team are evaluated on their capacity to put excellent designs into practice rather than just developing new technology for the sake of it, regardless of whether it benefits users or not.

If UX designers limit their work to user requirements, wireframes, and simple prototypes, they will be unable to lead. Simply put, design alone is insufficient to lead in this new environment.

What Exactly Is Front End Design?

A specialized phrase, front-end design, is used to represent a set of skills for people who operate at the interface between user interface (UI) design and conventional front-end engineering. Strong front-end designers ought to be capable of:

• A fundamental interaction model and wireframes should be understood, criticized, and improved.
• Using front-end markup code, create pixel-perfect page structures.
• Apply visual styles using various visual layout techniques.
• Creating interactions with a variety of interactive technologies.
• Experiment with dozens of different typographic layouts and interactive elements.
• Recognize the reasons behind a product’s actions.
• Keep track of new technical trends, comprehend their effects from a design standpoint, and educate designers to enable them to create the best, most modern user experience.

Key Business Reasons FED Should Be Part of UX

There are a number of reasons why front-end design belongs in user experience rather than engineering. Here, we’ll talk about a few of these causes.

Integrating FED Enhances Your Ability to Innovate Overall

An organization can innovate at the lowest cost and greatest scale and can maximize its creative effort with the help of a certain set of capabilities.

The ability to better collaborate with other key departments and evaluate and iterate hundreds or even thousands of ideas without tearing down the organizational infrastructure is made possible by integrating front-end development with user experience.

User Productivity is Improved and Product Adoption is Increased by Creating Scalable Designs

UX designers typically do a good job of promoting user adoption by optimizing elements like total clicks and total pages in flows, but they are rarely able to accurately predict how a design will scale when a user interacts with a running system made up of hundreds of interactions and objects.

The speed of product development is increased by reducing coordination and transaction costs.

Whether it is JavaScript, Flex, or HTML, production code for front-end technologies is constantly changing. In User Experience and Development, project management techniques vary substantially, and the mentalities of the two teams frequently diverge significantly.

This frequently leads to conflict between the User Experience and Development teams, which raises total coordination requirements and expenses. Overcoming the gap between good enough and extraordinary is a significant challenge.