Why Developers Should Care About Design

There has always been a long debate if developers should know design principles and conclusions have never been reached. But if you ask me, then yes, they have to know something about design, even if not as much as graphic designers. It is important to know programming languages more than design when you develop systems, and I totally understand people would rather learn PHP and ASP.net and leave design for the experts.

But many of the world’s very good developers know a few things about design and can therefore develop better systems. And yes, it is actually possible to know UI and UX even if you are a coding ninja with tremendous skills in PHP and other hard-core programming languages. Moreover, it will only do good to you and your products.

You can be a developer, a designer or an accountant, but you can go on a website and find within minutes mistakes on each one of them. After doing this a few times, you will realize that you already debug design patterns.

To show you exactly what we mean, we will compare the approach of two huge internet competitors, Google and Yahoo! Although Yahoo! shows signs of slowing down lately, their importance on the web, especially in the past, can’t be ignored.

Google started a service called Google Videos some years ago. The project was a failure and unfortunately ended somewhere in the trash, years after YouTube was bought by the American giant. The project started with the minimalistic design Google got us used to and the service looked a lot like YouTube does today. It even added links to related videos on the right hand side of the page. The issue with services trying to copy each other hoping that what worked for one will work for all is big on the web, and I could find many more examples.

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While a huge number of people tried to copy YouTube (which not even Google could copy perfectly), only Vimeo stands out – and it is still not even close as good. It is the same with Digg and Reddit – this time, at least, Reddit got quite close to Digg and some consider it being even better. The truth is that copies of web technologies do not work all the time. When a product is already popular on the internet, the addition of a new one which doesn’t offer much more is useless. The same happens now with Google+ and Facebook. Google’s service does not come with something new and therefore shows signs of failure, exactly like Google Videos, Google Wave or Google Buzz.

The only thing people want is innovation. You can’t have a popular product only by ripping the best features off other ones – you have to innovate. Therefore Google lost ground with Videos.

This teaches us a valuable lesson. Innovation is the only way to success and innovating carelessly is exactly like not being innovative at all. Google’s image is less powerful because of these products that failed, because it made us judge its expertise. I am sure developers learned an important lesson from Google’s case. Focusing too much on developing other products and not on the design, which can improve the results on short term, is much more likely to bring failure.

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Yahoo!’s case is a bit different. The former internet leader could have done things a bit differently and maybe today would still be one of the important players out there. Yahoo!, instead of trying to focus on few products, tried to focus on way too many. This meant that they offered a whole range of features trying to “catch” every bit of attention on the web.

Google still dominates the search domain especially because they focused on it. While Yahoo! tried to develop as many things as possible, Google focused on the simple search box we know today. And this was successful; this was the reason why Google managed to get where they are, becoming the most visited website ever.

When you think of Google, you think search and e-mail. When you think of Yahoo!, you remember search, e-mail, chat, weather, financial, cars, blogs, news, maps, fashion, dating and many others. I repeat: and many others. Yahoo!’s problem is that they overdid it.

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This teaches us a total different lesson than the first one. It is actually the same lesson, but turned around. Not focusing too much on design or developing a product to its best, might bring you a lack of success. It is not only difficult to keep up with so many features, but having so many things you offer makes it difficult for any company to create a powerful, solid brand.

The contrast between Yahoo!’s and Google’s approach is huge and, while one of them led to success, the other took a company from success and minimized its importance. Design is important because, as these two examples show, this is the difference between success and failure. Sure, earlier we didn’t talk specifically about the kind of design we all know (based on grids, images, lines and so on), but about actually thinking of the product and improving it. Nevertheless, the important lesson is still easy to see in these two examples.

When developing a brand, it’s very important not to only be good at what you’re doing, but also to focus on that particular feature much more. Trying to develop new solutions that do not bring something new (which basically means they are rip-offs) is not the way to success, not even for Google, the most reputable company in the US and probably in the world.

On the other hand, a balance has to be kept between developing and design, because each product needs both of them. Both are important and will never become less important than they are right now. It might be difficult to keep a balance, but if you have managed to find the right tracks, staying on them will bring you success.