I work in a team of 6 developers, most of us are senior-level developers but we have 2 juniors too. And usually we could just happily develop our code and throw up some interface as we seen fit. But recently things changed and I wasn't that happy about it in a beginning.
My software manager approached us and told us that there were introduced heaps of bugs with the latest deployment. And those "bugs" were not the bugs in the codebase - instead they were UI and UX bugs - things were not loading extremely fast or were too hard to reach (for example if the button you have to click is too small). So after that we had to hold up our next deployment for 2 weeks and even start doing hallway testing! He is the boss, but initially that request was greeted with a lot of salt. After all we are simple developers - we want to write code and not to move buttons around the form. And we all know how the design will look like if developers do their best :) Another disturbing thing is that request came out from from blue. (Maybe because our manager was busy checking other projects he has not payed enough attention or just read some UX book...)
Anyway, we were not pleased and even now we can joke about that a lot - like "have you seen that show-stopper bug with wrong font size in that label?". But after some extra thoughts that request seems like something reasonable. After all we develop our application for users, to solve their problems and if they cant use it because the functionality is buried under those layers of crappy interface it is not working. It is almost the same - if the app is not working because of code bugs or if noone can understand how to use it. More than that - after the initial introduction to the systems users might just ignore the feature you have created because it is unusable; it can be really hard to turn them back to the feature later.
So what I am trying to say is that if your team doesn't have a separate designer/UX expert - every software developer should read at least few articles on most common UX/UI mistakes and try to improve the look and feel of your application. Those bugs can be even more dangerous then the regular ones. You can catch the bug in your code with unit test/integration test, but as you developed the feature - you cant really test the UI! You just know it from inside and wont notice the obvious defects. Hallway testing is the solution :)
Good luck and happy coding!
My software manager approached us and told us that there were introduced heaps of bugs with the latest deployment. And those "bugs" were not the bugs in the codebase - instead they were UI and UX bugs - things were not loading extremely fast or were too hard to reach (for example if the button you have to click is too small). So after that we had to hold up our next deployment for 2 weeks and even start doing hallway testing! He is the boss, but initially that request was greeted with a lot of salt. After all we are simple developers - we want to write code and not to move buttons around the form. And we all know how the design will look like if developers do their best :) Another disturbing thing is that request came out from from blue. (Maybe because our manager was busy checking other projects he has not payed enough attention or just read some UX book...)
Anyway, we were not pleased and even now we can joke about that a lot - like "have you seen that show-stopper bug with wrong font size in that label?". But after some extra thoughts that request seems like something reasonable. After all we develop our application for users, to solve their problems and if they cant use it because the functionality is buried under those layers of crappy interface it is not working. It is almost the same - if the app is not working because of code bugs or if noone can understand how to use it. More than that - after the initial introduction to the systems users might just ignore the feature you have created because it is unusable; it can be really hard to turn them back to the feature later.
So what I am trying to say is that if your team doesn't have a separate designer/UX expert - every software developer should read at least few articles on most common UX/UI mistakes and try to improve the look and feel of your application. Those bugs can be even more dangerous then the regular ones. You can catch the bug in your code with unit test/integration test, but as you developed the feature - you cant really test the UI! You just know it from inside and wont notice the obvious defects. Hallway testing is the solution :)
Good luck and happy coding!
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