| I'm a developer with some interest in UX, design and perhaps most, graphical design and typography. I'm fine with no-coding UX specialists however - I have notice that not being able to code at all while working in a rather "techy" role is often a proxy for not being able to create a coherent mental model of the the processes and features that they are building an interface for. This might be a bigger or smaller problem - if the system complexity is low, then maybe "superficial" features like readability, flow and layout is more important. It's hard enough to get good at - I suspect that some inherent flair is required to get good at that. If there is a true inherent complexity, then the more hard-core aspects of modelling and how well the users can understand and interact with the model is of more importance. It's another skill set, but when it's needed it's very important to get right. Learning to code typically enhances ones modelling skills, and more importantly "failed" devs are probably not suited for UX either. There are of course plenty of people that are intelligent and smart enough to get god on "modelling" on their own. That said, there seems to be a lot of UX people around that have read a few books and are practicing some generalized rules they found on some websites, and could fall head first in big pile of good design without noticing it... I doubt it would be hard to compete with them. A cool haircut seems to be enough. While I am whining, while Personas is a good tool - keep it to a minimum - no full size cutout dolls, CV, background story, accessories, etc. I suggest to keep it to the level described in User Story Mapping (Patterson) and stop there... Anchor the personas with the sales guys, support guys, and people that potentially have met a user. |
To the extent coding helps train you to think clearly about complex and---especially in this case---ambiguous things, it probably could help your ability to design. But! I've often been baffled why most developers, who should be good at modeling, are so often unable to transfer those skills to UX design.
The best explanation I've been able to give so far is largely that "modeling" is somewhat equivocal when viewed in terms of day to day work. Think about the very different skills, knowledge, values, habits of mind, etc it takes to construct a useful data model for a relational database, a predictive dynamic model of neuron populations, an evocative persona model of users, and so on. One neat observation here is that if you try to build, say, a persona in a similar form and with similar standards as a database data model it will be a disaster...unable to fulfill it's purpose. (Not disagreeing with your comment about ridiculous persona models here!)
IDK, this is cool to think about and there's a lot more to say but I'll leave it there.