Why Good UX Design Starts At Good Engineering

We’ve all experienced this: You download an application to help with productivity, only to find out that some options are missing, helpful features are hidden behind 20 dropdowns and the experience is sluggish. At least the app looks really nice right?

When thinking about “bad UX”, we often think that it’s a design issue, e.g. harsh colors, rough animations, hard to navigate, something that could be fixed with some “UI tweaks”. But in reality, bad UX is the result of poor engineering decisions, slow backend calls, inconsistent state management, incorrect error handling or badly implemented features.

Good UX design starts way before the designer opens Figma, it starts from when the foundation for the application is planned by the engineers.

What is UX Design?

Before we can go into what good UX design is, we need to define what UX Design itself is. At it’s core, User Experience (UX) design is about how people feel when using a product. UX isn’t only about how the application looks, but also about how it behaves. At the end of the day, application behavior is driven by the underlying code.

How Developers Shape User Experience

A developer’s work directly shapes how users interact with software. Every engineering decision contributes to how the user experience feels, either frustrating or effortless. When developers focus on building fast, predictable and accessible systems, they’re building a foundation for good UX.

When building software, don’t stop at “does it work?”, go beyond that and think “how does it feel to use?”. That means to try to predict user behavior (reduce friction), reducing waiting times, design clear feedback for different actions and make sure the application feels consistent throughout. This also means collaborating with interface designers to ensure cohesiveness across the application.

Developers play an essential role in maintaining good user experience in an application. Well structured codebases, thoughtful performance optimizations and good accessibility practices help to make sure that users enjoy your product.

Principles for Good UX

Whenever thinking about good UX, the following principles can be thought of when designing an application:

• Consistency: Keep UI elements, behaviors and responses, consistent across the application. This gives users confidence in what to expect with certain interactions.
• Responsiveness: Not web responsiveness, but more performance responsiveness. Keep the application running smoothly and snappy. Try to give instant feedback on interactions, use optimistic rendering where possible.
• Error Handling: Show clear, concise messages when something goes wrong. Help the user to recover whenever an error happens.
• Accessibility: Consider all users, including those with a disability. Proper contrast, ability to navigate with a keyboard and screen reader support matter.
• Anticipate User Needs: Think about all the ways users will use your application and build systems that reduce cognitive load and make the experience as friction-less as possible.
• Collaboration: Developers who work closely with designers can visually anticipate edge cases and catch them before a feature is implemented without thinking about that edge case.

By following these principles, developers can proactively create user experiences that feel effortless, intuitive and reliable.

Conclusion

Engineering and design go hand-in-hand to create a good User Experience. Good UX isn’t only about visual, it’s also about how the application feels to use. By focusing on consistent, responsive and accessible experiences, developers can actively contribute to good user experience, ensuring users can enjoy the product without friction.