It is about time for design and development to meet
Why we should bring the two disciplines closer together
It is estimated that the leading two mobile App Stores currently hold around five million mobile applications with several thousand apps submitted to app stores every day. That does not even include apps for the newly emerging markets and technologies like Virtual Reality, Smart Homes and Wearables of which the growth we are about to experience soon.
While one can argue that only a fraction of all these apps are making any impact on our economy and progress, let’s keep in mind that with numbers like this even that is substantial. For example, the total spending in 2016 in the Apple App Store alone was just shy of $30 billion. The revenue for developers almost doubled from the previous year.
There’s a catch, however. The business of building apps (mobile or otherwise) is very deceiving — it looks more simple than it is. Businesses and founders have a tendency to underestimate the importance and cost of excellent user experience. So many good ideas and startups fail on a notion of thought that ‘building this kind of app must be so simple.’ Building a successful app almost never is.
Apps that excel and attract users and ultimately revenue require experts from numerous fields like (in no particular order) copywriters, language specialists, product owners, production engineers, marketing specialist, growth hackers, community experts, and I have likely left out a bunch here.
The two most impactful fields of expertises required to build a successful app are however software engineering and user experience. The level of experience, dedication, and attention to details that both a software developer and a designer contribute to building an app will likely determine the success of a project.
Still, so often businesses focus on either field separately, dealing with collaboration and integration between both areas as an afterthought. Like no painting will ever be as good if the painter would think about the artwork and the technique separately, separation of development and design also almost never leads to a fantastic user experience.
We live in an era where tools like Sketch, Zeplin, and Origami bring design closer to development than ever before. 2017 is a year to give collaboration between development and design a thought. How do we optimize a process for a designer and developer to work closely together? How do we empower both professions to have an impact on the opposite fields and how do we make sure that we learn from each other?
I feel it is about time we finally meet. That is why I decided to co-found the App Design & Development conference that’s going to be held this summer in Barcelona. We will not just boldly invite developers and designers to meet at the same event; we will make sure that each talk on this single-track conference will have value for both. Also, just as important, we will ensure that breaks are not just breaks, but a forum where designers and developers have a chance to meet and can share ideas, knowledge, and experience in an inclusive, fun and structured way.
If you are an engineer that is passionate about user experience like me, or a designer that does care about how things work like one of my co-organisers, join us on ADDC 2017 from June 22nd-23rd 2017 in Barcelona and open your horizons.
More information on https://addconf.com
About Matej Balantič
Matej is engineering manager for the core clients team at SoundCloud with more than ten years of experience as a Software Engineer, focusing on mobile development for more than half of his career. While Matej is an engineer by trade, he is passionate about how software affects users and believes the user experience should be as relevant to developers as coding itself. In his free time, he builds a POKERNIGHT app for iOS, tvOS, and watchOS and is a co-organiser of App Design & Development Conference in Barcelona.
