Who are the Developer Experience Designers and why we need such a role
Let’s be honest, developers don’t see the Internet the way other people do. They are not scared to see what the internet insides — the Code. They love it, the code is the ultimate truth. How do you design tools used by developers? Do standard UX practices work for techy users?
Developer Experience (DX) is defined by User Experience (UX) where the primary user is a developer, and the product is aimed to solve an engineering problems, e.g. developer tool, client libraries, SDKs, frameworks, open source code, tools, API, technology or service.
Stripe got their developer users' hearts by their famous 7 lines of code. They turn developer experience an obsession, and in return Stripe is a de-facto payment provider for most of the business on the web, in the western world at least.
Github created development infrastructure so convenient, that developers maintain their GitHub profile just like a social network, where they share code for work or private projects.
Many B2B tools have part of their products targeted to developer users, often it’s a crucial part of the experience and further product use is important without the development part: integrate the SDKs, pull the right data from one database to another, connect the right APIs, ensure the integration is stable and secure. Good DX also means less time wasted on completing the task and brings more joy, developer time is precious and frustrated devs bring no value. Thus the usability of these product features deserves an equal proportion of UX love and dedication.
User Experience is built upon user empathy. The problem is that classically trained UX people often lack have the necessary knowledge to emphasize deeply with the techy audiences and understand their needs. Standard UX practices only work if the designer and the user can speak the same language and deeply relate to the user’s problems, use the same UI behavioral patterns. A developer might prefer to use the command line and no visual interface, the designer would try to convert it to the shiny low-code interface. Hiding the code is a way to go for any other user, but can easily be a no-go for developer users. Here comes a need for a dedicated role in the User Experience team, the DX designer’s mission is to connect specifically to the techy audience, to understand developers’ needs and desires, speak their language, anticipate their struggles, engage in the engineering community, and run user research, ensure that all the pieces of code and documentation are available to our users in the right moment and the most convenient manner.
Do you think you can be a fit for such a role or know someone who can be interested? Reach out to me and let’s have a chat!
Here are further resources and read recommendations:
