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Should UX designers learn to code? An ex-developer’s perspective

Let’s reframe this question to actually turn it into something useful and actionable.

Paul Pela
UX Collective
7 min readFeb 28, 2019

Photo by Irvan Smith on Unsplash

Disclaimer: I’m an ex web developer who spent the last 10 years creating advanced solutions and websites for clients. I worked most of that time as a freelancer, but I also did some work as a on-site contractor and for a short period of time as an actual employee. For most of my career I used WordPress as my base for my projects, and what comes with WP — PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I also learned Swift and started developing iOS apps. There I finally discovered my real passion for design and decided to move to UX. Oh, and I also worked at IKEA’s Customer Service for 1.5 years!

Any developer who hears about UX designers learning to code will probably have two answers pop up immediately:

Yes, they definitely should if they are able.

And:

Let’s see how long it took me to learn everything I know. A couple of years? A decade? How do they possibly want to learn all this?

Yeah. There isn’t a simple road to actually learning to code in a short timeframe. Especially when someone can’t allocate most of their time to learn coding because they have their primary job and a life…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Paul Pela

Future dad, 9to5: tech support agent. I write about the User Experience of learning programming.

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Great blog post, Paul. It is great that you have the perspective of both code and design to approach this topic. I definitely agree with you that UX designers should understand at least the basics of development that bring their ideas to life. A few…

Let's reverse it - should programmers learn to design?