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.

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. In a week or two, you may begin to dabble in basic concepts. Put a month of effort in, and you will begin to understand some things, although you may not be able to understand more complex situations and especially, you may have a hard time debugging and solving problems. That’s what coding really is most of the time.

In my opinion, there’s a much better way of asking this question:

Should UX designers learn and understand the basic concepts of the technology that’s used to put their design to production?

And now we should be ready to answer with a “Yes.”

Instead of learning programming (although, if you can do it, if you are interested and if you have enough spare time — certainly go for it!), you may want to learn what happens with the work you send to production and how each part of your project is…