Designers may not have enough time to learn everything, but knowing vanilla HTML and CSS should be enough to add a significant distinction between a flourishing career and a dead-end one. It should be a quick and easy process for designers to take the first steps. The more they know, the more they can expand their horizons when it comes to job opportunities. Understanding measurements and code structure, i.e., how pages are displayed, will provide a deeper understanding of the front-end development process.
Behind JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and SQL, Python is the fourth most popular language with 44.1% of developers. Check out this article on how you can learn this popular programming language for free. The most common markup languages that UX/UI designers should know are HTML & CSS. HTML is used to format the structure of a page, and CSS helps add styling such as font size, color, opacity, and more.
There is too much to learn
To understand the differences between these two roles, and to truly understand if programming for UX/UI Design it’s a must, let’s start by defining each role. You may be thinking “this article baffled me even more”, what can I say, I was very fair to both sides. This can maximize the productiveness and minimize the time spent to figure things out on both sides. Because although the machines and technology become more and more prominent in our lives, they still serve humans, and humans have certain demands, starting with a smooth experience. Whatever the reason may be, I think it will still be discussed for a long time, because people have two standpoints regarding the issue, and they both make sense (kind of). The reason why it is unanswered could be that there is no authority to say, or maybe it’s because of the ever-growing and changing environment of the technology world.
CSS, a.k.a. Cascading Style Sheets, is a standard markup language that’s usually used in conjunction with HTML. CSS controls colours, font size and other visual aspects of a course ux ui design website. Success stories from our course alumni building thriving careers. Master content design and UX writing principles, from tone and style to writing for interfaces.
That’s just not the job description
There might not be a need for a single line of code in your project; because there is possibly a non-developer friendly tool that can do most of the work for you. Metaphorically speaking, if HTML is the skeleton of a page, CSS would describe the height, the body shape, the skin, eye color, hair color, etc. The language has a very simple code structure that determines typography, colors, positions and dimensions. Sharing and documenting my journey on self-development, career and my life in university. If you are thinking of getting into UI/UX design, you probably have this question in mind. Learn how data science can help us understand Rafael Nadal’s success and how impressive his career has been at the clay court tournament.
The client side refers to anything that is displayed or run on the “client,” a.k.a. the user’s device. According to Wikipedia, there are currently over 700 programming languages. If you know how to code, you may end up doing some of the developer’s work. This sounds good at first, and especially for the companies, it is better to hire one person for the job of two, but it may be better to work in a team sometimes. So, to sum up, a person can become a successful UI/UX designer not knowing programming and development; however, this kind of knowledge can be supportive if used wisely. It is often characterized as the scientific and practical approach to computation as well as the study, exploration, and automation of diverse operations with data.
Why you need not learn to code
However, it doesn’t mean that without this sort of knowledge, it’s impossible to create good designs. Moreover, if designers work in a team with developers, they can create designs without knowing how to code even easier as they are supported by developers who control the process from the perspective of coding. In a small bootstrapped team, designers may need to assume more responsibility; and so, they may need to learn how to build the products as well. In larger teams, knowing the ins and outs of programming languages may not be necessary. However, knowledge of how different pieces of the solution fit and work together is important to be able to communicate within the team and make the product development process more efficient. However, to really boost their careers, designers may want to delve more into development.
That in turn will cause designers think more deeply about their designs and how to make them more efficient for that process. They will know what can be easily achieved and what would be more challenging. That journey includes different touchpoints – from the legal terms of use to the pricing model, from microcopy to illustrations and images, and from customer care to the code behind products. If we extend these analogies to UX design, then the materials used to bring designs to life—web / mobile applications, products or services—include technological components. A UX designer, thus, must know how the technologies required to build a product work, to be able to design it.
Understanding Code and How to Code Is Understanding Pixels
No relation to JavaScript, Java is another multifaceted programming language. Programmes written on Java can be run on any operating system – a feature unique to Java. Generally, Java is faster and more efficient than Python but it can be harder to learn.
Having answered several questions of this sort on Quora recently, we would like to share our ideas with Tubik Blog readers as well. Increasingly, more and more work opportunities in the design field include “nice-to-haves” such as basic web-development and prototyping skills using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s for each designer to decide how much to take on; clearly the need is out there.
Therefore, should designers know how to code?
It is difficult for individuals to excel at all spectrums of the process beginning from research to design and all the way through building out the product. Because the majority of us aren’t able to complete all aspects of the process, we need to be able to rely on and seamlessly communicate with our Engineer partners. But by being able to understand basic front-end code it gives us, as UX Designers, two upper hands.
No, you don’t need to know how to code to be a UX/UI designer. You may have heard that user interface design requires programming, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, in most cases, what is happening is that design is being confused with programming. For UX design, the designer must have knowledge and skills that allow them to create an attractive, comfortable, and appealing experience for users. This involves prior research, usability testing, applying content strategies, and, above all, understanding the needs and habits of the user.
Should UX Designers Learn to Code?
For example, if you’re designing a responsive website, prototyping the various breakpoints with a few placeholder components can help you decide which breakpoints are most suitable for your product. After all, knowing how to code gives the UX designers more authority on the project and more capacity to further optimize the user experience. HTML and CSS are not scripting languages and are easier to pick up than JavaScript (especially for designers). With HTML and CSS, you’re working directly with interface elements that border on the visual design aspect of the product. Knowing how developers think, and what they need to be able to do their job, will make a designer a great asset to any multidisciplinary team.
- That is, the designers understand the developer’s perspective, allowing them to collaborate on a deeper level.
- One of the challenges for UX designers (and even developers) is that the world of technology continues to evolve, with new languages and frameworks being developed at a fast pace.
- Fresh insights from experts, alumni and the wider design community.
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- It allows you to understand certain technical limitations that you may need to abide by in designing prototypes.
- Further, it can be used to display dynamic interactions between the front end and the back end without reloading a page.