In my last article, I mentioned how designers are among the most valued workers in a start-up. As a start-up founder, you will do anything to keep your best designer with you, for as long as possible. The next set of articles looks at the spectrum of people who do everything from designing the flow of instructions for users on an app, to writing the code that loads the homepage of your favourite website as quickly as possible.
Before we start dissecting personas, let’s step back. Let's look at the big picture of how the Internet and mobile web have evolved. We have lived in the following eras:
1. In the 1990s and early 2000's, websites were static pages. These static pages were designed with tools such as photoshop. The journeys of some of the best UI engineers and designers started with producing mockups using photoshop.
2. Then came the HTML5 boilerplate around 2010 which revolutionized the way content could be presented on the internet. From here, we have a long and fascinating history of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which further refined content presentation. This led to engineers and designers specializing in writing CSS – because a website is judged by its pages, just like a book is judged by its cover.
3. Simultaneously, we moved to a new era where web pages were loaded by servers at the backend. These were the early days of programmers' love-and-hate relationship with JavaScript.
What is JavaScript? No, it is not the cousin or younger sibling of Java programming language.
Invented by Brendan Eich of Mozilla, JavaScript was that crucial landmark in the history of web technologies which helped produce interactive websites. Unlike static pages that didn't do anything more than show you information, JavaScript made it possible for users to interact with websites via clickable buttons, graphics and all those 'cool' things that make users and designers squeal with delight.
4. The rapid adoption of JavaScript also led to fairly rapid development of the Internet as the interface for users and subsequent web technologies. I will not get into much detail here due to lack of time and space. Check the internet for the detailed history of JavaScript.
As users started taking to the web, and later browsing the web on mobile phones, large and small companies realised that interactivity, intuitiveness and ease of use of the interface were primary baits for users. We therefore have companies like Google and Facebook invest significant resources in developing new web frameworks such as AngularJS and ReactJS respectively, that have been widely adopted outside for developing better user interfaces. “Today, designers must not only attend to details such as right padding, gradient, colour and perfect pixels; they must also focus on performance engineering and stay up-to-date with the latest JavaScript technologies that control front-ends,” says Mario Stallone, UI architect at Myntra.
The tools for designing the Internet – the medium, the interface – have produced work and creative workers. They have simultaneously produced dearth. Ace JavaScript programmers, Sunil Pai and Rakesh Pai (not twins, but Siamese nevertheless), once remarked: “The tools for web design are evolving so rapidly that if you do not code for six months, you will get outdated in a matter of time.”
While this is an exciting moment in the history of web and mobile development, it also means that those who are far down organisational hierarchies will be pushed further down. Women in tech and junior programmers, who have far fewer ‘incentives’ to upgrade their skills and invest time and resources to learn new technologies, will stay behind. This is the irony of tech work.
On the one hand, we have a handful of ‘ninjas’ who take risks and adopt new technologies early on. And then we have a problem of plenty – those who have no good reason to rise up the ladder because organisational structures do nothing to reward initiative, innovation, self-education and contribution to open source technologies.
Until bureaucratic systems and thinking of managers and leaders in organisations change, designers will be only so few.
Zainab Bawa is the chief editor at HasGeek Learning. She curates India’s best technology conferences on data science, payments, web development and other emerging fields in IT.
