Is it crucial for a UX designer to understand the principles and concepts behind Object Oriented Programming?

Question

As a designer and sometimes coder myself, I have been exposed to the idea and principles behind Object Oriented Programming, and having a knowledge in this area definitely helps when it comes to conceptualizing screens for proposed software applications. Developers would immediately get the gist of the screens.

I'm curious though if the knowledge of a designer of OOP would have a big impact when it comes to User Experience Design? What kind of scenarios would it be a huge factor in the effectiveness of a design? Are there any instances where it is?

Answer 1

No.

Those are two fundamentally different jobs. Except in the scenario that the UX design is for a product the primary purpose of which is OOP development (e.g. an IDE).

Otherwise, of course, there is no harm to knowing the "principles" of OOP. Further, knowing about a broad range of different things (including OOP) can certainly help you to think differently. But it is equally important to understand that OOP is just one of many approaches to programming, there are others (e.g. functional programming). But to get to a level where your skills are actually useful in a production environment, you need a lot of practice/experience as a programmer.

On the other hand, there are designers, who out of their own personal interest, learn programming and get good at it. But that's the same as a marketeer learning programming and getting good at it.

This is a fantasy that some hiring managers and many recruiters tend to have - that they need to hire genius all-rounders for all jobs. Usually, it reflects a lack of understanding of the role they themselves are hiring for.

The only (rare) situations where it is useful is in extremely small product teams and barebones startups. Even then, it is far more practical to have a programmer who can do some basic design work, than the other way round (designer moonlighting as programmer). It is easier to have a programmer do a crash course on design and get them to do some basic design work, but a crash course in programming won't make your skills actually useful for anything other than building simplistic toys/prototypes.

"Developers would immediately get the gist of the screens." That is not the job of the designer. Products are designed so that the users, not the developers, immediately get the gist of things. The designers' customer is the user, not the developer.

As a practical example, consider Jony Ive, the legendary ux/ui designer. It is easy to check that he is in no way a qualified developer. One can assume that degree courses in industrial design are meant to prepare people to work as designers. It is easy to check if the curricula of some of these courses include any real OOP/programming content (they don't).

Here is a quote from Don Norman, the guy who invented the term ux

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were extremely good. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to gain its meaning.

Answer 2

Perhaps not so much learning the principles, but understanding the principles of Object Oriented Programming or the equivalent does help with some aspects of UX design.

The short answer would be NO (i.e. it is not crucial), but the long answer would be YES because by developing a process that helps you articulate the relationship between different entities within a business process or workflow, it helps you make very strong connections between people, process and technology.

There are techniques common to OOP such as using UML (Unified Modelling Language) to document the actors (i.e. users), processes and the swim lanes to understand the different roles and responsibilities people play within a business process that also overlaps with BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) that are particularly useful for documenting technical details that can be translated into design decisions on the user interface side of things.

There are concepts in OOP such as inheritance (relating to the definition and instantiation of classes) that can help reinforce ideas of modularization and progressive enhancement in design assets for your design systems.

Of course, there are alternative approaches to OOP in helping you to conceptualize and document information and requirements in a structured way, but because UML and BPMN are so prevalent in the business analyst and software development circles (and because UX design doesn't really have its own standard methodology for this), it is quite worth investing some time to at least understand the core principles.

Answer 3

As someone who works as a designer and knows OOP languages, I think some of the philosophies of OO kinda help with understanding structure, particularly if you're getting into SCSS and modularizing your design to create reusable chunks of content. But that's not really OO, but more understanding of variables and basic programming concepts (like keeping it DRY).

Overall, depends on your role as a designer but I think the challenges you face in OOP like Dependency Inversion and SOLID principles don't really overlap with your ability to do UX well.

Answer 4

I'm a web developer and darn good at what I do. I once applied to a mechanical engineering company to re-build their lousy web site which was originally created by a mechanical engineer part-time. To get the job, I had to take a mechanical test. Most of the things on the test I had never even heard of before much less knew how to answer. (It mostly tested on hydraulics, metal folding and such.)

Would passing that test make their web site work better? No.

Object Oriented Programming is computer science and the purview of Programmers and not User Interface designers.

This whole idea nowadays that everyone needs to know programming is insane.

Answer 5

Wow, a satisfying thread. There is often a debate in modern society - should a designer be able to programming?

Personally, I think that knowledge of programming patterns or concepts (OOP) is necessary to become a high-class designer.

Why do I think so?

1. You can model the database in cooperation with a back-end developer. (Creating models)

2. The design process is differently, knowing that the interface will be programmed, attention is paid to the whole process, and not only until it is passed for implementation with the "cope for yourself...

3. Cooperation with a front-end developer is a pleasure when it affects the final solutions, and you can provide it with sample animations on Codepen.
4. Programming helps to create scalable systems, in addition to see that a photo is only a string of bits, depending on what the user provides, not a great aesthetic photography.

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It depends on the scale and phase of the project, but there is always a issue of specialization.

However, it seems problematic that companies often treat UI Design as a sales tool - and later there are usually implementation costs / unforeseen scenarios.

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As Michael said, real design begins on UML + BPMN.

Answer 6

One thing I would add to this conversation is that UX designers should also understand how a webpage is marked up as well. Too many designers don't realize that divs are containers, that one can move containers around but one can't readily pull these containers apart. This lack of understanding often comes up when discussing media queries and break points.

Take the example of a three-columned site with content in each each column. Assuming each column is it's own container UX designers SHOULD know that one cannot pull apart the content within each of the columns and place them elsewhere.

I cannot tell you how much time and energy is wasted dealing with designs that cannot work for just this reason.

Answer 7

Other answers have basically said "no, but there's no harm in knowing it". I'd like to challenge that and suggest that not only do UX designers not need to know OOP principles, but they should not do UX design from a perspective of having been freshly exposed to OOP principles or long-term infatuated with them. UX design has nothing to do with OOP, but it's easy to do bad UX design around how the computer/programmer organizes data rather than what's meaningful to users of the system. This can be found in all sorts of desktop and web apps done by inexperienced UX designers or programmers with no background in UX design, where the UI ends up being just a thin wrapper around a database and it's painfully obvious that that's what it is.

Answer 8

I don't agree with the answers, especially with the one that has most votes. It is 2019 outside and the industry is developed enough to blur the borders between the roles.

In short, UX Designer + Programmer = UX Engineer

A role description from Google Jobs:

As a UX Engineer, you’ll weave together strong design aesthetics with technical know-how.

You’ll partner with researchers and designers to define and deliver new features, translate concepts into living, breathing prototypes, and iterate on interactions, animations, and details to deliver the perfect experience. UX Engineers also collaborate closely with UX Researchers to user-test new concepts and assist engineering.

Because the UX engineer is hands-on with the actual implementation, he has even deeper insights on the user experience and user interaction. He is tweaking the tiniest settings that distinct the great experience from good experience. He is an innovator as well because he knows the constraints and looking for ways to go beyond them. So the answer should be definitely YES, knowing programming have a huge impact on your efficiency, your product and your salary ;)

Further reading on the topic: Who is a “UX Engineer”? by Alex Ewerlöf