Benefits of Being a UX/UI Designer & Front-End Developer

At LaunchPad Lab, we believe that knowledge is power and we strive to utilize cross-functional knowledge to better our client’s projects and our team’s growth. Our team provides an opportunity for our designers who are interested to grow their skill set into a dual role of UX/UI designer and front-end developer. This dual role focuses on CSS/SCSS and HTML as the primary front-end development languages as a complement to UX/UI design.

The ability to combine the roles of UX/UI designer and front-end developer has created a great cross-functional position that offers unique benefits that we will discuss in today’s post. Continue reading to learn more!

Development & Design Benefits

Having the ability to see the duality of both the problem and the potential solutions in a developer mindset as our team is doing research, creating wireframes, and defining the site architecture opens up the designer to more ideas for creative solutions. 

Working collectively with developers during the initial design process enables them to make recommendations that support the overall project constraints, such as timeline, budget, and complexity in features. This enables them to know general estimations based on the design, putting the full team in a better position to effectively communicate the UX decisions and how the differences in design would impact those estimations. Talking through that comparison in choices with the client also allows the team and the client to see the holistic view of the choice they are making. 

Outside of timeline/budget, there is still a great benefit to being able to view the feature set holistically from design to development. This makes it possible to anticipate any edge cases and design toward those from the beginning, saving time and reducing future problems. As a front-end developer, you are also exposed to a lot more UX cases and can solve design problems by selecting a solution that fits the project cohesively.

Accessibility & Responsive Benefits

At the core of it all, it’s hard to communicate accessibility standards purely through design. As we mentioned before, knowledge is power—and in this situation, having the ability to either communicate those requirements or implement them ourselves enables us to keep our projects on track and stay focused on designing for our users’ needs.

Responsive breakpoints and how the UX adjusts to those breakpoints can greatly improve the development process speed as well. The ability of the designer to communicate to the client what will change in certain viewports will allow us to jump right into the development when the time is ready and be able to implement the viewport changes faster. 

Implementation Benefits & Changing Course

Like many things in life, change can crop up at any point and adaptations need to be made. With the designer serving as a front-end developer, the ability to confidently make changes to design UI and UX while in the code is a huge benefit to the dual role supported at LaunchPad Lab. Without having to go back and forth between people, it allows for there to be no loss in quality in the design changes and a faster pace in decision-making and implementation. 

Sharing the Wealth

We love to share our wealth of knowledge with the rest of our team. During our weekly design meetings and in our committee meetings, we take time to share these findings among all roles so that these insights can become more common knowledge and benefit all clients. While working on client projects, designers collaborate to push the expectations and uncover how the design can grow from others’ input and experience. Discover more about our company constants and team today!

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