Should Designers Learn to Code? with Frederick Andersen

Can you go a little deeper on that? I'm very curious to know, what are some of the things that other design teams are just not doing as well as you would like?

For me, I can speak from my own experience.

So I put a lot of effort, of course, into maybe some initial user research, figuring out who are we designing this thing for.

That turns into some hands-on design work within Figma first.

So there could be wireframing turning into product design, fully-fledged annotated design ready for handoff.

And then no matter how much effort I put into that handoff to development, something always got lost in translation.

And I think where what I see, at least with a lot of agencies in general and design in general, for many reasons, for because of pressure from stakeholders, timelines, the way the team is structured, whatever it might be.

That handoff and that transition, a lot of things get lost.

And that's the main issue because all that intent, the end product is essentially in the hands of the developers to some degree, because they are in control of the output.

And we just lose a lot of the effort, time and resources that design and research does to get it to that point, which is a shame.

It is.

And I don't have any companies that are like that, especially because they want such fast turnarounds all the time.

And in order to make those demands meet, there has to be, you have to cut corners.

And I feel like that's very unfortunate because a lot of the users suffer for it.

And I think design engineering, which I think we'll go into a bit later on in this episode, but design engineering is really this unlock from my perspective, at least in terms of bypassing a lot of that.

A lot of those decisions being made in the corners of the business or stakeholders having a certain opinion in terms of like, it really, it empowers designers to get beyond just the normal sprint process of saying, okay, we can only fit this within this scope or this sprint.

And then the rest goes into some sort of backlog that we'll never look at again.

And to your point, that hurts the user experience.

But I think design engineering enables designers to then do certain things on their own that ends up in the output in the design that we just haven't been able to before recently.