Does UX design require coding?

 Do you need to know how to code in order? to become a UX or product designer my the short answer is no when I made the transition into UX I barely knew HTML and CSS to this day I've never been asked to code as a designer and I never want to code this is not to say though that you shouldn't know how to code by all means if you're inherently interested in learning how to code you should take some free online courses out there but if your main goal is to become a UX or product designer this is not your priority because there are so many other areas that you should focus on improving such as visual design knowing UI patterns and best practices product strategy and articulating your designs in front of stakeholders what we really need to be good at as designers in terms of coding is knowing about coding and knowing how to work and communicate with people who code you're developers and this is one of the challenges for people with just getting into the industry because you're expected to have work experience with developers but all your case studies are just personal projects or projects from school it's a catch-22 because in order to have that experience working with developers they're asking you to already have experience which you don't have so it can get a little discouraging but think of it this way it's like working with any co-worker on your team the more you interact with them you understand their language better you understand how they think what their goals are and what kind of the environment they're working in the same the thing with developers you need to understand what kind of developers are so there's front-end and back-end engineers front-end focuses on the UI and the visuals so if a button needs to change or color looks weird font sizes look janky you need to go to the the engineer who is focusing on the front-end and the backend engineers are ones that are dealing with screen flows and so what often happens with the projects that I'm working on is that I'll do a kick-off with the back engineers I'll walk through my designs and how each screen interacts with one another so that they understand what structurally needs to be built and then you have your iOS and Android engineers and so even if it's the same app that you're designing it can look different on iOS and Android because they just have different standards and systems and logic in place with all these developers what's really important is that you understand their code environment and the technological constraints that exist because that's going to affect the way you design things and you also have to understand the different trade-offs and to give you an example because all of this may sound very vague and not concrete this is a project that I worked on it's the referrals program for instant car shoppers and you just look at this page it just looks it has a button some text illustration not much to it but there's a lot that goes on so I've had to you explain to them what happens when you click on this button will there be a populated message when you're trying to share your referral code with people and things like that where little things come up that you didn't realize was a constraint from the engineers and you have to consider those things and say okay is the user experience going to be compromised for this particular change because the time and the effort involved in making that change from the engineering side is way too complicated and costs are too high then the answer is okay we'll make a compromise here but it was something very substantial that needs to be changed in the design and how it currently works and it's gonna take you know a week longer than it's supposed to take and therefore this project is going to be shipped a week late like is that the trade-off we want to make as a the designer you have to consider those trade-offs and lay them out before the team and help the team make decision another question that a recruiter will probably ask you is how do you hand off your designs to engineers like what does that look like and a lot of times you won't know the answer if you've never worked with an engineer, maybe I'll cover that in another BLOG if you have any other questions around working with engineers comment below or emé comment on my Instagram I'm the most active on Instagram and I do look at every single the message even though I take a while to get back and I will see you in my next POST bye