[fivre]

Any sort of HCI or design stuff was absent from my CS education, and it seems to be one of the bigger gaps I see with engineers: not many people will try to have someone actually use their software after creating it, and there's a ton you can learn by seeing how people fail to effectively navigate your UX or try to use it for something they wanted but wasn't originally scoped.

I got that through years of providing helpdesk service to end-users, and it's staggering how much UX kludginess gets into production that would have seemingly been caught by watching 1-2 people (other than the software authors) actually try to use it.

Those responsibilities are ostensibly handled by other business units, but that either doesn't actually happen in startups (what's a design team? we don't have one!) or would be smoothed by the engineering side having a basic foundation of the concepts involved, enough to understand the rationale behind UX stuff and challenge bad design before it gets in front of users.

[majormajor]

> Those responsibilities are ostensibly handled by other business units, but that either doesn't actually happen in startups (what's a design team? we don't have one!) or would be smoothed by the engineering side having a basic foundation of the concepts involved, enough to understand the rationale behind UX stuff and challenge bad design before it gets in front of users.

Even more directly, someone has to operate (from the back-end, not as an end-user) the systems you build, and usability (or even existence of) tools for that is often terrible.

[war1025]

> would have seemingly been caught by watching 1-2 people (other than the software authors) actually try to use it.

A thing I always do when doing UI work is actually try to use it. I feel like that is glossed over by my coworkers so often and it's maddening. Yes, you might have fulfilled the specific wording of the ticket, but we're going to get a bug report as soon as any user actually touches that interface.