I thiiiink the thing with UX is that they consider overall usability and click paths, while UI is more down in the reeds and looks at more specific things like alignment, design language and color choices. The line between seems pretty blurry though, and how it works in practice probably differs widely between companies.
A good UX/UI team can make or break a project. As a Frontend-focused software dev, that kinda hurts admitting. It’s just always very frustrating to deal with them, because designers are specialized in design. So they neither know about technical limitations that make trivial seeming things hard (like conditionally changing a buttons color based on server state) but they also don’t know about technical “freebies” that the libraries we use give us (like just telling a component that they can overflow and render things wherever you want in ways that Figma would never allow you to design). So talking to them is hard, which leads to a spiral of never talking to them, fucking up the UX, and then dodging them while they try to get the UX fixed. That just sucks for everyone involved.
Hating the Design Team is apparently such a universal experience that Josh W Comeau has a great article on it. Really worth the 15min read, if you want to improve your relationship with the design team!
like just telling a component that they can overflow and render things wherever you want in ways that Figma would never allow you to design
This is probably the one reason I hate designers the most. My personal biggest gripe about mobile apps (and desktop apps for that matter) is when there is plenty of screen space available to show a long piece of text (like the name of a song or movie, for example) but the allocated display area is small and the text is just truncated with ellipses. I had the experience more than once of being handed a design like this and simply modifying it to flow and allow full display of the text although this made the height of the element variable (usually not even requiring any special code or library, just HTML which handles this automatically). The designers always objected to this modification and insisted that it be removed, and the managers always backed them up on the grounds that my modification would take too long to implement - even though it had already been implemented (trivially) and would take even more time to remove.
That is to say, the designers always objected when I was foolish enough to mention that I’d done it. I did eventually learn that lesson.
I thiiiink the thing with UX is that they consider overall usability and click paths, while UI is more down in the reeds and looks at more specific things like alignment, design language and color choices. The line between seems pretty blurry though, and how it works in practice probably differs widely between companies.
A good UX/UI team can make or break a project. As a Frontend-focused software dev, that kinda hurts admitting. It’s just always very frustrating to deal with them, because designers are specialized in design. So they neither know about technical limitations that make trivial seeming things hard (like conditionally changing a buttons color based on server state) but they also don’t know about technical “freebies” that the libraries we use give us (like just telling a component that they can overflow and render things wherever you want in ways that Figma would never allow you to design). So talking to them is hard, which leads to a spiral of never talking to them, fucking up the UX, and then dodging them while they try to get the UX fixed. That just sucks for everyone involved.
Hating the Design Team is apparently such a universal experience that Josh W Comeau has a great article on it. Really worth the 15min read, if you want to improve your relationship with the design team!
This is probably the one reason I hate designers the most. My personal biggest gripe about mobile apps (and desktop apps for that matter) is when there is plenty of screen space available to show a long piece of text (like the name of a song or movie, for example) but the allocated display area is small and the text is just truncated with ellipses. I had the experience more than once of being handed a design like this and simply modifying it to flow and allow full display of the text although this made the height of the element variable (usually not even requiring any special code or library, just HTML which handles this automatically). The designers always objected to this modification and insisted that it be removed, and the managers always backed them up on the grounds that my modification would take too long to implement - even though it had already been implemented (trivially) and would take even more time to remove.
That is to say, the designers always objected when I was foolish enough to mention that I’d done it. I did eventually learn that lesson.