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This is a story about not fitting in with most traditional company org structures. I consider myself a UX Designer or Design Engineer. I am comfortable having conversations with C title, product, designers to front-end and backend developers. I am also comfortable with discovery sessions, white-boarding, wire-framing, high fidelity mockups, defining design systems, prototyping, and building those designs into accessible front-end production ready components for a component library. I am responsible for our component library and have been working with our architect on folding our code bases into a monorepo. Finally, I am versed in web performance. I consider myself a recovering full stack developer. That is simply because I have learned over time when I do less, I can go deeper and provide better value. I credo is that I like to know a great breath of things but not at the expense of depth. This site is a good example. They split Job Groups by Product Designer (or Design) and Software Engineering. When I look at sites reading job postings, they tend to fit in a Software Engineer band or Design band. As we know the former pays more. Pay isn't everything but I do wonder if having these skill sets makes me more valuable. Many designers do not think about web accessibility when in wire-framing/UI phases. When looking at roles I wonder if just doing design or just doing front-end development will be boring. This is also daunting because I am working on a design portfolio and thinking about front-of-the-front-end development questions. My talents tend to lean towards prototyping labs environments or working on design systems. I am curious to see what others thing in regards to this kind of mix of disciplines. Is there more value, less value? Should I just stick to one or the other? Feel free to AMA. Aside: I can also decode HTML. 🤣 #tech #ux #uxengineer #designengineering #designtechnologist
I have meet folks like you. In fact I work with a fellow who is considered a UX Developer. (BTW- I am a UX designer and we work together quite well). He and I are currently building out a new design system. I determine the UX success criteria for each component. He makes it pixel perfect and codes. He and I both have visual design skills, but his unique skill set is coding and mine is HCD. I work with stakeholders to develop user stories, moderate user research sessions, and other design thinking stuff :) He doesn’t do any of that but knows how to develop. There is a place for you but you may have to dig a little deeper to find the right opportunity.
Got ya. Yeah, someone to bridge that gap between design and development is what I consider "Design Technologist", or at least when that term came out it seems to be scoped to what this individual does working with you. I'd love to talk sometime about what you are doing to determine UX success criteria for each component. You led into this a bit with with stakeholders/user stories/user research. This tends to be dynamic and specific to the org but I bet there would be great take aways from a discussion like that. Thanks for your input!
I’m a former front end dev turned design technologist now UX designer. There are niche roles out there that combine all of these - but don’t expect higher comp just because of your broad skills. You’d think (and I used to think) that would help, but it doesn’t. Finding a lane and focusing is probably your best shot at maximizing your comp and career growth. It’s why I left the dev-signer type role behind.
Interesting how a UX Engineer comfortable with all things UX down to front-of-the-front-end-development is somehow not as desirable as picking a lane or even a Full Stack Developer. As a recovering FSD it's not like I can't get back into the frey of of it again. It just means I have less time to go deeper on design and front-of-the-front-end.
Do you work on a design system team or workstream at ADP currently? Design systems are great concentrations to be both.
There are roles for you out there. However you’ll be focused on one or the other and you will be allowed to chip in on the ux side of things in a company like Facebook as an engineer for example.
Thanks for the feedback. A design manager asked me recently what my 70%/30% daily looks like. A few years ago when I was actively working on redesigning our app and 70% of my day was in design tools, 30% coding in the component library. Today we have an established component library which is the source of truth (for reasons) so 70% of my work day is coding in our component library and 30% in design tools.