The paths of software engineers and UX designers are converging, and in many ways, overlapping. Software engineers are recognizing the power of user feedback, and UX designers are appreciating technical limitations and possibilities. In a digital economy, the ability to maintain user interest is competitive advantage. But it's a matter of bringing together two different mindsets.
Gabriel Ruttner, co-founder and CTO of FeatherDocs [1]and Udacity instructor on developer-designer interaction, says tomorrow's software jobs will require expertise in both disciplines. In a recent online discussion[2] with Udacity's Matt Hui, Ruttner described how software and UX professionals approach problems from different perspectives. "Often designers might want to build things that are too out there, too outlandish," he points out. At the same time, "engineers will want to build things that are too technical and too difficult."
The designer "will usually start at the problem definition in an understanding of the behaviors and the constraints in that realm," Ruttner explains. "You're looking for understanding into what the users trying to do right now to solve problems, and you're looking for pathways and opportunities that you can jump in that are easy enough to solve."
Software engineers, on the other hand, "come at it from a slightly different point of view," he continues. "You'll have some kind of problem definition, you'll have some objective some business revenue or some other metric that you're trying to drive. You're going in and trying to solve that thing optimally. You have some kind of software that you can throw at that idea, and you will try to make that software the best possible thing in order to solve it. You're trying to hone in on one specific thing and make it great."
The differing mindsets tend