How to Build Your Coding Skills as a UX Designer
How to Build Your Coding Skills as a UX Designer
Improving your coding knowledge as a UX designer doesn't require going back to school.
We'll cover how to incorporate coding into your UX process and share some best practices and tools to take your skills to the next level.
Where Coding Can Help UX Designers
Communicating with developers
As a designer, being able to speak the same technical language as developers will make collaboration much easier. Discuss code-level implementation details, identify potential issues earlier in the process, and ensure your vision is built accurately.
Prototyping and testing
Knowing how to code allows you to quickly prototype and test your UX designs. You can build low-fidelity prototypes to get user feedback on your ideas before investing a lot of time and resources into development. Then, use tools like JavaScript and CSS to bring your prototypes to life and create interactive, high-fidelity prototypes that provide an experience much closer to the final product.
Leveling up your designs
With a little bit of code, you can enhance static designs by adding microinteractions, animations, conditional logic, and dynamic data. For example, use CSS animations to bring movement and visual continuity to your designs or JavaScript to create an interactive map that pulls location data from an API. These types of enhanced, interactive designs lead to better user experiences.
Programming Languages
To better understand design tools and communicate with developers, learning some coding basics is key.
HTML and CSS
HTML provides the structure of a web page, while CSS controls the styling and layout.
JavaScript
JavaScript brings interactivity to web pages. Build interactive prototypes and understand how features get developed. Learn JavaScript fundamentals like variables, data types, functions, objects, and arrays. You can then explore libraries like jQuery to add interactions to your prototypes.
Other languages
As UX design expands into new domains like voice, AR, and more, learning additional languages will be useful. For example, understanding Python or C# fundamentals will help when designing for voice assistants. Learning a bit of Swift or Java is useful for mobile app design. The key is not to become an expert in all these languages but rather understand the possibilities and constraints of each to design effective user experiences across domains.
Integrating Development Into Your UX Design Process
To become a well-rounded UX designer, you need to understand the technical aspects of product development. Integrating a basic knowledge of coding and web development into your design process will make you a more efficient designer. You'll gain an appreciation for what's easy vs. difficult to implement, and you can design more realistically.
Collaborate with developers
Work closely with developers during the design and build process. Explain your design decisions and share wireframes, prototypes, and redlines to make sure you're on the same page about the vision and experience. Be open to feedback from the developers' perspective and use it to improve your designs.
Think through the technical feasibility of your ideas as you design. For example, consider how animations and microinteractions might be developed, or whether a design system needs any new components. Question how your designs might translate into code, and try to avoid unrealistic or overly complex designs that will cause headaches for the dev team.
Stay up-to-date with technology
New web languages, frameworks, and other technologies are constantly emerging. Keep learning so you understand the latest options for bringing digital products to life. Stay on top of design tools as well, and learn to use them more efficiently and collaboratively.
We’re also excited to share a new tool that you can try to see if it’s useful for your workflow! Codux, the all-in-one visual development environment to help you as a designer to build your coding skills in a visual way
You can now edit CSS and style React components visually directly on the source code. Have full design control and create pixel-perfect UI the way it was intended, all within web standards. Collaborate in real time with developers and improve your handoff process.
If you need help, here’s a tutorial series!
Conclusion
Start small, find online courses and resources to build up your skills, and look for opportunities at work to collaborate with engineers. Coding may never be your core competency or passion, but gaining technical knowledge will make you a much more well-rounded and valuable UX designer.
At the very least, you'll gain insight into development processes and be able to communicate better with engineers. And who knows, you may even discover some new interests and career paths you never expected!
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