The spectrum of design work in the context of web and mobile is very wide. Front-end engineering has emerged as a challenging job role in this backdrop, as engineers must combine combine design and User Interface (UI) engineering skills. These skills could be inherent, or they must be acquired on the ‘job’. Design schools are far behind in producing front-end engineers, because the pedagogy paradigm in these institutions does not consider, let alone include, code as a way to produce repeatable elements of interface design. The more fundamental problem with design education in India is that the web and mobile are still viewed from the lens of publishing content, not from the point of view of interactivity and products. This paradigm works against the complexity of interface design, leaving experiences at workplaces and peers as the primary sources to develop skills and mastery of designing UI.
“Good UI design is extremely important because markets are where the users are,” Mario Stallone, Associate Architect at Myntra, tells me. Users are hanging out on apps where the interfaces are intuitive and performant. A good desktop or mobile product – such as your favourite food, e-commerce or social networking app – is a series of minute instructions and flows that work seamlessly without the user noticing the frameworks, lines of code and the architecture powering it. And it has the aesthetics and the visual appeal that has the user’s attention, whether the user noticed it or not.
The obsession with detail is critical because “front-end engineers must be aware of the various platforms and screens their code is going live on. They must ensure that they provide the best-looking front-end apps for these devices and screens,” Stallone points out. This is not the end of their work. Front-end engineers and architects must also plan and deploy code which will scale for future use cases and business scenarios. So, if your business or product has planned for acquiring its next million users in the next six months, the code should scale for this use case, so that the app continues to perform and load as reliably as it did when the number of users was fewer.
The difference between interaction designers and front-end engineers is that the latter understand the strengths, limitations and nuances of platforms on which the interface is designed and made visible. In this respect, front-end engineering encompasses the code and frameworks which make it easy to produce repeatable aspects of the interface on different platforms, or fundamentally, a new way of building the interface, such as Facebook’s React framework did some years ago.
In the next column, we’ll look at the interactions and coordination between UX designers, UI engineers and product managers to understand how each persona’s perspective of business requirements, design and interface informs the work that engineers and designers do.
“The outcome of what you get to build is immediately visible to customers,” Stallone concludes. Front-end engineers are, therefore, at the frontline of configuring products for different users, and eventually markets.
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
