Bridging UX and Web Development

Part II. Sitting in the Driver’s Seat

If designers aren’t participating in implementation, they are giving up control of the user experience. All of the time and effort put into specifying and prototyping the microinteractions of a product may be for naught if you aren’t there to see it through. Any amount of involvement is going to help, but to maximize one’s influence, a designer should be hands-on, implementing as much of the UI as he or she is capable of. According to a recent survey of 963 user experience professionals conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, 94% of us have worked on websites and web applications (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-career-advice/). We are fortunate that the languages used in front-end web development are relatively ...