Software Engineering vs UX Design
It’s an age old war between functionality and design. Software engineers argue that it’s a robustly coded product that matters the most. Whereas UX designers assert that a saleable product needs to be easily understood by its potential users.
Which one of the two is more important? I guess it’s a wrong question. SE (Software Engineering) and UX’s approaches might be different but they are striving for the same goal- excellence. This sounds perfect on paper, but in real life one of the approaches always gets ahead of the other in a company’s work culture, depending on what the management and other big players believe in. For example, Google is known for their SE culture, as it was founded by two software engineers. Even today, their products are known to be sturdy, close to perfection (compared to their competitors) and trustworthy. They makes sure, with their flawless functionality, their products become necessity for their users even without evoking much emotional response (This approach is rapidly changing since 2011–12). In contrast, Apple has their focus on designing. It may have stemmed for co-founder Steve Job’s strong opinions about user experience and product’s beauty. Apple products are widely known for their sleek and clever designs, accompanied by a good functionality. Does having the company’s locus-of-interest on one methodology affects the other? While nobody exactly questions Apple products’ beauty, the technology industry frowns upon its marketing gimmicks of releasing similar products in different versions without changing much of the core functionality.
But according to me, Apple surely gets credit for introducing UX culture among tech giants. Technology companies by default were supposed to be all about SE. And that’s exactly why their products could not leave offices and hobbyists’ garages. It was Apple’s phenomenal success in personal computing, that made everyone realize the power of user experience designing. But it is still waiting to become an integral part of product development life cycle, in most of the fields. Just other day I was talking to a friend working in the automobile industry, who was animatedly informing me that having a separate UX lab is still a relatively new concept in the 130 year old automobile industry. When I asked him, as a mechanical researcher how he felt about so much research funding being dedicated to UX nowadays, he said and I quote, “they just make the cars look fancy, we are the ones doing the real work!”
Just as software engineers had in the 70s, UX still has a long way to go.
