Where do you draw the line between designer and developer?

August 3, 2007 on 1:56 am | In General, Web apps |

As web 2.0 applications get more and more mature, the roles of web designers, web developers and web application developers become more and more blurry.

Years ago, web designers simply design web sites. They aren’t very different from traditional print designers. Sure, some of them might not only do the design, but also code up their designs in HTML. But a lot of times, web designers are only responsible for the visual designs, and they pass on their work to web developers to convert the visuals into actual web pages. Back then, there wasn’t even much of a term as “web application developer” — what is a web application in 1998? A form mail script? A guestbook? Nobody would do that for a living. Let’s rephrase that — you won’t make a living doing that.

Now we enter the web 2.0 boom. Full-fledged web applications are being developed. Meebo is my favorite example. And there’s Google Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. How are applications developed? By programming, obviously. Just like desktop applications, web applications also have a backend programming element to it, as well as a frontend interface programming element. These are huge applications we are talking about — they are as large as or even larger on scale than desktop applications in the past!

Web applications backend programming is really not much different from traditional programming people have been doing since the beginning of time. (except maybe working with different languages — like PHP, Ruby on Rails now. But people still use Java and C++ too!) When we get to frontend, things get a bit different. We have new technologies like DOM scripting and AJAX. These technologies are still in sort of an infant stage. It really takes a tech-savvy person to bend them at will and do what you need to do. Heck, even writing standard XHTML and CSS and making sure they work across browsers is a challenge!

Needless to say, frontend development work has to be done by programmers as well. Here’s where the problem comes in. As we all know very well, programmers aren’t good designers. What this translates into is a whole bunch of web applications with badly designed interface. You could hire a designer to make things look good, but if an application has a bad interface, that makes it a bad application.

It takes a usability expert and/or a great UI designer to do this frontend work. Very often, the frontend programmer is not this person. Currently, the only solution to fix this problem is to hire somebody who is both a great UI designer and a programmer to do the frontend work. It certainly is a big challenge! There aren’t that many of them out there.

And we come back to the question. Where do you draw the line between designer and developer? I am a web application developer. A lot of times, however, I find myself having to take care of some aspects of the frontend design. So should I be considered a designer in addition? The designer at my company needs to learn some web apps programming in order to improve on her work. She needs to understand how AJAX works, how the DOM elements on the page work, in order to make her designs work. So is she a developer now?

Frontend applications development is an interesting job. It takes both good design knowledge and technical knowledge to do the job — an unusual duo. Frontend developers should really be more valuable than backend programmers, since old-school programmers are a dime a dozen. Why aren’t we getting paid more?