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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to meet people like this because of attitudes like this. I have three designers on my team who are also world-class engineers, yet they often don't advertise themselves as such because they run into the "well if they do both they can't be good at either" attitude.

No-one bats an eye when an engineer also turns out to be a fantastic musician, or when an engineer drives great product decisions, yet somehow being able to code and understand design is an impossibility?

We're here to build great things - code and design are mutually-beneficial skills in your toolbox; your brain is not zero-sum.

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I would agree with you if these were complimentary skills we're talking about. However, programming and UX design are almost contradictory.

For programming, you need a mathematical inclination, attention to detail, willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, etc. For UX (and any kind of other) design, you need more an ability to create art - paint with broad strokes, look at the big picture, etc.

This is my opinion, YMMV, feel free to disagree, etc

No, you're incorrect.

UX (User Experience) is about designing exactly that - an experience. It's about being extremely detail oriented, mathematical inclination (sifting through metrics, a/b testing data, CTR, bounce rates, etc.), willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, sifting through hours of user video seeing how people interact with an application and then finding solutions to make the UX more smooth. Sound familiar to what you wrote about your "programmer"?

Not so different after all it seems.

EDIT: Everyone seems to confuse UI design with UX design. They are very different, and in some cases are different job descriptions.

UX is about empathy. Understanding how other people think and the emotions they feel. All those tools you mention are metrics to keep score, but without an understanding of how your users think you are playing a fun game of guess and check. Sure with enough iterations and metrics you can figure out anything, but your users won't give you that many chances. Someone who can get the initial design in the right ballpark and use metrics to fine tune it is your UX guy. As I programmer I really struggle putting together a viable initial UX, and I don't think I'm unique in that struggle.

Quite frankly, it's because I think very differently from most people and have trouble understanding their thought process. I'm not introverted or especially socially awkward or any of those engineering stereotypes. Everything from my ability to creatively approach problem solving to my subtle dry sense of humor is because of my different way to think about things. But when I need to think like everybody else, I just can't do it. That's why I need a UX guy.

> For this you need x, for that you need y

My life experience has taught me this couldn't be more wrong.

To be a great engineer you need to be smart.

To be a great ux guy you need to be smart.

To be a great product guy you need to be smart.

As someone doing all these 3 and more. I live by the saying that a smart person can be anything he wants (intellectually). And the only limits I've seen in a smart person are only what he tries to be good at. If you're smart, you'll be good at it. That whole different types of intelligence hypothesis is pseudoscience.

That may be, but people interested in computer science are, in my anecdotal experience, less likely to be interested in visual design (and vice versa). E.g. I can look pretty smart when talking about math or cs, but I'd look retarded if I said anything about visual arts. Sure, maybe I could try to learn a thing or two, but I've never cared because I'd rather be learning more math.

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