Do you think having easy, straightforward and stylish (with brand) UX/UI design should be a consideration when coding? Or should you just leave it to a graphic designer!
How can you have a mix skill set or talent for one process and not the other! A product designer needs to be working alongside all coders as they lack the skillsets of the coder!
Thoughts=?
The usability of a product is just as important as the code. Be it a hackathon or a product being built for production you need an architecture for how it looks on the runway before the first line of code is written. What do users need to see? Have you performed any tree test or other user testing of a prototype? Did you talk to the developer as a designer and explain in user stories how this UI is intended to function? Is your design practical for code? Lots of questions could and should be asked upfront. You can’t leave it up to a designer just like the code can’t be left up just to the developer. Designers lack the skill set of a developer too. So you have to be a team. Unless you can do it all, which I have seen some super talented devs be able to build amazing frontends that are highly usable. Whatever it is, you aren’t done once you build, you have to keep testing over and over and iterating your user experience just like you have to refactor code. It evolves constantly.
It all depends on the Skill. All I can tell you is that the Application User interface is as important as the backend. Most people using Facebook, Whatsapp etc. does not care what codes that runs in the backend. All they care is the application UI, Scalability and easy of use. Some developers are good at UI design, Front and Backend app development while some are not. As @drew.harris stated above, it still balls down to skill set. Get a Team to supplement the area that is lacking in the skill and things will be okay. Thank You…
Those are all very important issues, and the fact that you are thinking about them gives you a leg up over people who don’t.
Designing a software app is engineering, pure and simple. So you have to go through the regular engineering cycle - starting with brainstorming and design, moving through implementation and testing, on up through release. You can’t skip any step, and you can’t do them out of order.
Some people are really good at one of these steps and terrible at others, but if they work as a team so that you have good people at every step, you’re doing great.
Just like you would not ask a graphics artist to debug your code, you wouldn’t ask a coder to work up a color palette for the UI!