A Study of Front-End Developers’ Views of UX Professionals: Usability Tests Are Like Unicorns

• Rolf Molich

  DialogDesign

  Author

• Jurek Kirakowski

  University College Cork

  Author

Despite numerous empirical studies of practices in software development, little is known about cooperation between front-end developers and User Experience (UX) professionals. This paper provides insights into how front-end developers view UX professionals and what they expect from UX professionals. This is important for UX professionals who want to know their users to better cooperate with their stakeholders.

Our study revealed insights obtained from UX professionals interviewing front-end developers. Seven teams comprising 10 experienced UX professionals participated in the study. Each team independently recruited and interviewed two or three experienced front-end developers from different organizations using a semi-structured interview format. There were 20 interviews in total.

We used quotes from the front-end developers to derive four front-end developer personas that exemplify typical attitudes towards UX and UX research. Step-by-step descriptions of the development process, a Developer Journey Map, were extracted from the 20 interviews. There were striking similarities between the Developer Journey Maps. We created a general Developer Journey Map, focusing on touchpoints between front-end developers and UX professionals.

Our key advice for UX professionals who want to improve cooperation with front-end developers includes the following: respect front-end developers as partners and engineers, rather than subordinates; support the front-end developer flow state by specifying, and helping them with, edge cases; and be available during implementation to answer questions quickly, and in order, to avoid interrupting their flow.

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1. Rolf Molich, DialogDesign

   Rolf Molich has been an independent usability consultant since 1993. He is a founding member and former VP of the User Experience Qualification Board, UXQB. Rolf received lifetime achievement awards from both the UXPA and the German UPA for his work on heuristics and the Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) studies.

2. Jurek Kirakowski , University College Cork

   Jurek Kirakowski was Senior Lecturer in University College Cork, where he ran the Human Factors Research Group (HFRG) from 1985 until retirement in 2016. His research interest is in the software development process, and he taught psychometrics and data analysis. He currently runs a consultancy company, User Experience Solutions.