Devs do need designers (2020)

cian

@McD

A good 'product designer' (by which I mean a trained professional with a mixture of analytic and design skills, combined with a background in human psychology/physiology) is about as far from a 'competent Committees with Product Managers' as you can get. A lot of what a good product designer will do is identify what users want (which is a skill, and not one many people have), build a cheap prototype of it and test it - BEFORE ANY CODE (which is really expensive) is written. If you involve me, or someone like me, early on your product I can save you a ton of developer time. Similarly - a good product designer is an 'artist' in the way that you mean it. A developer (and my background is development, so I'm not knocking it) is more of an engineer.

Now obviously I think your average IOS (and desktop) 'hobby' developer can't afford a good UX person, just as they can't afford decent marketing or business support. But that's not a reason to denigrate those skills. Audio products would be better if they involved a larger team who knew what they were doing. Lone developers who can also do product design are incredibly rare - as are product designers who can code.

There are a few sets of audio tools on IOS that I can think of that have genuinely great UX (Nanostudio, Brambos' stuff, Audulus, the newer Moog stuff), some more that are pretty good but have issues (Jonatan's stuff, Audiobus), mediocre but perfectly usable (a lot of the synths and plugins) and tools that I use despite serious UX flaws (the Apesoft stuff for example - love what it can do, but god the UX). From my perspective, what makes me sad is often the flaws are things that don't require user testing to fix - somebody with experience could fix them pretty quickly.But it is what it is.

vitocorleone123

@cian Well said.

The biggest barrier to user testing is... time. Time to become minimally competent at how to do it ok-ish. Time for the logistics. Time for analyzing and integrating the feedback Time that won't go into development if it's a solo operation. Then there's a little $ involved, at least to compensate participants, but could also be for some online testing which will cost $50 (making that up off the top of my head) for a few people. Each time. Which is also a barrier to someone who won't make money on it in the first place - at least not money that makes up for their time spent on a passion project.

Separately,
It's also been noted that Apple's ecosystem is geared toward releasing new apps as quickly as is reasonable, rather than fixing/improving old ones. Why are bugs often not fixed, or apps no longer receiving updates? It isn't financially viable once an independent (and often solo) developer gets enough bugs fixed so that the threshold is passed and people will likely consider buying the next app from them. Someone in that situation won't have the $$ for another person to help with the UX (or anything else).

McD

@cian said:
Now obviously I think your average IOS (and desktop) 'hobby' developer can't afford a good UX person, just as they can't afford decent marketing or business support.

I think that's my point.

All developers might benefit from good design input. They just can't
afford it in most cases or they get it too late to make a difference.

But that's not a reason to denigrate those skills.

True. My apologies for maligning your craft.