Great post, Meagan. This year, I moved back into a dev/designer role for a product after nearly 3 years of mostly developing/sometimes-but-rarely designing. To be frank, I’m not working on the sexiest-looking app at this new job, but our application’s mere existence saves tons of time for my coworkers, so the value is very real, almost tangible. I dove right in to writing code specifically to avoid having to design all those little error states and edge cases, figuring I’d stop and do some design when I got stuck, but by doing so I wound with less elegant solutions.
So, for a new module on the same platform, I took the time and set the expectations for wireframes and a more formal design process. When designing a product, having the time to think through all the minute permutations of state, of edge cases and errors matters more than anything else. It is a humbling lesson to learn product design the hard way, but very worthwhile.
Eric Fields
Great post, Meagan. This year, I moved back into a dev/designer role for a product after nearly 3 years of mostly developing/sometimes-but-rarely designing. To be frank, I’m not working on the sexiest-looking app at this new job, but our application’s mere existence saves tons of time for my coworkers, so the value is very real, almost tangible. I dove right in to writing code specifically to avoid having to design all those little error states and edge cases, figuring I’d stop and do some design when I got stuck, but by doing so I wound with less elegant solutions.
So, for a new module on the same platform, I took the time and set the expectations for wireframes and a more formal design process. When designing a product, having the time to think through all the minute permutations of state, of edge cases and errors matters more than anything else. It is a humbling lesson to learn product design the hard way, but very worthwhile.