I end up spending a lot of time talking about the relationships between designers and developers; how to help them work together and also how to survive on your own when you (the designer or the developer) is left alone to cover both bases.  Lately a number of people have pointed out how both of these topics would be moot if a single person could actually fill both roles – to steal a friend’s term, A Devigner.  Then it seems like the next step in that conversation is always either “so.. where do we get one?” or “how do I become one?”

devignergraphI don’t mean to paint a bleak picture here, but the population of people on the dev/design graph is basically the opposite of a bell curve.  Typically a person is really good at one or the other skillset and may have interest in moving towards the other end.  If you’re one of those people, that’s fantastic!  The development world wants you probably more than you’ve guessed and just by having the inclination you’ve already taken a healthy step towards the middle.

So how do you take more steps to the middle? To the designers in the audience, I’m taking these steps myself and will hold my judgement of my path for when I get somewhere.  For developers, I know you have resources on the design side (myself included) who want to help you come our way a little.  First I would suggest discovering what it is about the design side that interests you.  If we assume I meant “UX Design” up above every time I wrote just “design” then you have more options than the dreaded “Make it pretty” – visual design is, of course, a fascet of what we do, but there’s more to making an application enjoyable to use than what it looks like and any effort put toward that goal is never wasted.

Any successful UX designer is going to be at least familiar with each of the following fields of study:

  • usability
  • information architecture
  • interaction design
  • graphic design

Anything a developer can learn about these topics will take them closer and closer to being the elusive “devigner,” and a passion for making your user’s task easier and more enjoyable is certainly a leap in the right direction.