I’ve just spent the last 10 or so hours mucking over Kohana, Doctrine ORM and jQuery – all of which I really enjoy and think are great, but I’m starting to doubt my own ability to code. Do Javascript programmers spend more time building functionality and interaction, or mangling the libraries and fussing over browser compatibility? While I think jQuery is a brilliant API, I’m always wary of the quality of plugins that people write. Same goes for WordPress plugins. I guess free does come with a price (like the price of not using Java).
Which leads me to think – can there be a lone UX expert who also does web development? I’m sure there are folks out there who make a living doing this, but the literature treats the fields so separately it’s hard to see how these experts manage the line between the two.
Even with a team of two people – a UX designer and a web developer. How do they interact? Does the UX designer have a head start to come up with all the wireframes and storyboards, who then hands it over the programmer to make it functional? Do they work together in an agile fashion?
I think that as most technical work goes – there’s less and less breathing space for UX designers and web developers to work in very small, efficient teams, unless they are very, very good. I’m not saying that everyone else just sucks, but building websites can take a lot more time than you think it does, and unless you’re designing mom and pop websites all the time, it’s going to be hard to guarantee how much time is required to build good sites.
While plugins and APIs can be useful in increasing speed, they also can lock down the interaction and degrade the user experience if not planned well. Maybe established sites understand this all too well, and take a phased approach. Maybe this is why Flickr only launches a new (but exciting) feature only once every few months.
I used to think that as technology improved, so would our ability to build products. But I find that this isn’t always that simple. In fact, despite all the effort being put in to build so many plugins, APIs, platforms, patterns, components, etc – it still takes a lot of effort to put things together properly.
Thus, all software is bespoke, and are not exactly a lego-like mashup of neatly interfacing components that we tend to think it does.
My only question is, if we are to get better, how? Apart from being willing to devote ourselves to our tools and simply, get our hands dirty.
update: I found this presentation from Leah Buley from Adaptive Path, which she gave at SXSW’09. It comes quite close to what I was talking about. I’m not quite sure it always works out so simply, but I like the idea.
