Can AI bring back designer-developer hybrids?
Who’s a design-developer hybrid, you ask? 🤔
Short answer, designers who code or developers who can design.
Long answer, someone who can handle full stack design(wire frames, information architecture, testing, visual design, etc.) and also do full stack development(front end development, API integration, back end development etc.)
Sounds like a lot for one person? 🥶
In today’s digital world, definitely yes! That is why you see designers and developers as two species in the tech field. The role separation allows designers and developers to push the boundaries of digital products, by dividing and conquering the problem.
But not long ago, in the early days of computers and the web, this role separation did not exist. There were just developers, who also doubled up as designers. Of course, those were early days.
One thing both designers and developers hate today: the hand-off, ugh
Apart from being a hot subject for memes like above 😅, hand off process is a source of lot of problems in most teams.
- Two moving parts, instead of one, so friction is inevitable due to communication gaps
- Difficulty in understanding capabilities and limitations of each other
- Two different sources of truth, causing issues in iterations
- Different schools of thinking of designers and developers
While the earlier hybrid designer developer model cannot withstand the complexity of today’s digital products, it had one HUGE plus point — there was no design development hand-off.
What AI can’t do
- If you are a developer who does not have a good eye for design and can’t focus on the user experience, AI can’t magically make you a good designer.
- If you are a designer who resents writing code, AI can’t make you a good developer.
What AI can do
Let’s say AI does some half of design and some half of development. Can a design development hybrid handle it all now? Let’s see…
A real example of how AI helped "designer me", with code
I was building a side project and there was a specific functionality I wanted to accomplish in that app.
Fetch article from a link provided by the user and show the result in my app
Designer me without ChatGPT 😰
“Uff I have no idea how to do this. Is it even possible? It must be so hard”
“I have to go through countless tutorials, documentation, Stack Overflow answers and what not 🥵 Might as well forget it”
I actually did this and believe me, it was painful as a noob😭
Designer me with ChatGPT 🤩
ChatGPT took me through the process, explaining the solution, giving me code and also warning me about the edge cases. It turned out that the solution needed a back end server as well. I had no idea how to spin up a server, but I got instructions and code to do it.
A real example of how AI helped "developer me", with design
I wanted to design a logo for my desktop app called “Slack on Keys”
Developer me without DALL·E 😰
“I am not a professional designer, it is hard to make one 😓”
“I might have to settle for a resource that is hopefully close or get help from a designer”
Developer me with DALL·E 🤩
Prompt to DALL·E: “An icon of a keyboard key combined with letter “S” in light green metallic iridescent material, 3D render isometric perspective on dark background”
I finally settled with this :) Cool no?
Verdict? Time can tell ⌛️
Above examples showed how AI can speed up both design and development work to a great extent. This surely makes it easy for design-development hybrids to thrive.
Freelancers and smaller teams might benefit from hybrids to provide full stack solutions. Highly complex and large applications might still benefit from specialised designers and developers. It also depends on how fast AI can develop and mimic humans.
So, let’s wait and watch 👀
Here goes my portfolio website, just FYI ;)
