[allsunny]

The difficulty is of course that, ultimately, design sensibility is subjective. However, my experience working with folks that have actually studied design or otherwise specialized in user experience have a marked improvement (as measured with A/B testing) over the designs that are developed by "easy to find front-end developers with design sensibility." YMMV.

It's nice to hear of developers that enjoy design, even greater to find ones that are legitimately good at it, but frequently dealing w/ engineers that fancy themselves good at design can be... difficult. And, I'm not a designer.

[mgkimsal]

Any design done by anyone should get the same benefit of testing and iteration, regardless of whether it was a 'designer' or a 'design agency' or a 'developer'.

Biggest issue I run in to (from dev/tech perspective) when working with any 'design' person is that, in pretty much every experience I've ever had (done this for 20+ years in the web world), the person/team doing the design work has one of two issues:

1. they've never done web work

2. they don't provide enough state information

You put 3 toggle buttons and a sample piece of information in a mockup... but don't 'design' out what should happen when mutually exclusive things happen... FML. Because regardless of what choices I make to fill in the blanks (and there are always blanks), they're inevitably "wrong" from someone's view (the original design person, or someone on the client's team, etc) because they're now being presented with a decision to make that they didn't have to think about before.

It may come across as subtlety "passive aggressive", depending on how you word it, but... damn it - when you put a dozen widgets on the screen and indicate they're linked together - you need to actually think about every single possible state (and step flow, etc).

The more 'application-oriented' something is, the less useful I've found "designer" input to be, outside of giving basic font/color/styling guidelines.

It's worse when the people label themselves "UX", but still don't provide any of the state info.

[l9k]

There is a lot of designers that are not that good at design either... Some are just temps, interns, wrongly hired or have switched roles in the company.

And when you target (web) applications, a developer might even have more experience with the UX as a user and designer!

Each case depends on the qualities of the people involved.

[maigret]

Most developers “doing design” don’t only miss some basic skills, like proper need analysis, but plain don’t have the time to deeply analyze the problem. I know the “try it and see if it sticks” methods is popular right now, but monkeys won’t write Shakespeare by chance. I’m not telling that front end developers are not talented at what they do, they do know something very valuable. Their skill is to be able to understand designs as well as designer intents, and get them implemented right.

Now for some side project, of course good front end developers are better than no designer at all. Are they able to design for scale and high revenue? Only when they become full time designers.

[bryanrasmussen]

if ultimately design sensibility is subjective then ultimately code quality is subjective as well.

[allsunny]

it is, but what's that got to do with the price of potatoes?