UX Engineers: What We Are
Computer Science has majorly evolved over the last few years. With the insanely fast technological advances in not only the software, but the hardware world, specialized roles have become a lot more vital to covering all aspects of a successful product.
Here are some examples of the many different roles that could be filled to develop one website:
![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*8Nzr-siLhSZPL7wPJkzQKw.png)
UX Engineers are Engineers
This may seem obvious, but based off of the amount of recruiter emails I get looking for a UX Designer, I don’t know that the industry has fully accepted this detail just yet. On the day to day, the primary tasks that I carry out as a UX Engineer are the tasks of a front end developer. My stack includes HTML, CSS, JS, docker, vim, github, etc. In lieu of this, when I get these UXD emails I think to myself “I hope they find a designer!” and decline the inquiry.
Since I’ve placed you in the center of my responsibilities, let’s take a step back in the process and talk about that difference.
UXD and UXE Are Interdependent
Before a website is developed, designers have to go through the process of user research. This discipline in itself is an extremely vast area of expertise. (In some cases, UX Researcher is a completely separate role that precedes the design process!) Once the user research is done, designers move on to the actual design process. They have to consider the look and feel of the entire product. What will be our primary font? What color palette will we use? What will our icons look like (in many cases, designers create these icons from scratch!) Once an overall theme is established, they are tasked with designing a feature. Let’s say, for example, that this feature needs a control that toggles 3 themes: light, dark, and retro. This is where the UX Engineer enters the process! When a designer presents me with a wireframe of this new control, I think about how technically feasible this control would be to implement and if there are any more efficient ways to toggle this theme. In addition to this design collaboration, I will actually develop a prototype of the control to take back to the designer to try out. We may decide “Yes, this 3 way toggle is awesome!” or “You know what? This would be a lot simpler and more intuitive as a dropdown button.”
You see, UX Designers have so many skills and responsibilities that UX Engineers do not possess. In this process up until now, here are some of the tools that might have been used:
![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*aTsCIO5-gE0H7c5M-ZDxBg.png)
Anyway, back to our new toggle control. Once a decision is made about this control, I turn around to the rest of the development team and continue the engineering process.
A UX Engineer’s Role in the Front End World
I code up the toggle control and present it to my fellow devs to review. They critique my code and once everyone agrees, this control will be added to our library of UI components. Why don’t my fellow devs care about the design process? Because they don’t speak the design language. Just as a middleware engineer ties the back end to the front end, I tie the front end to design. We are translators!
![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*duIOGzfyXZX0ivgyLswrtQ.png)
Say the Front End Lead comes to the team with 2 separate bugs:
“This query is returning null values when we should have data”
This seems like a graphql issue. This is the focus of the middleware engineer and as a UX engineer, I don’t really care.
“Nobody can seem to find the global settings widget naturally”
This is either a UX or a CSS issue. The icon could be in the wrong place or styled in a pretty inconspicuous way. Either way, the middleware engineer doesn’t care about this problem. I do.
Am I really good at python? No. Am I really good at CSS? Yeah. These are both languages used by my current front end team.
Let’s elaborate on the UX Engineer’s role in Front End Development.
Three focuses of a UX Engineer:
- Human Computer Interaction (HCI) — How are my components being used? Is the product intuitive? My goal here is for the user to think “These analytics are super easy and fun to use. I can’t put my finger on why, though.”
- Development — I want every component I develop to have clean code and no bugs. I also want the styling architecture to be modular with reusable code and CSS variables that are easy to use. This way, my other teammates who don’t manage this architecture can come in and make changes without a problem.
- Design — When a UXD comes to the team with a user problem, I want to sit in the room to help brainstorm some workflows and possible components that I could implement to create the best new feature possible. Just like a designer would tell me what is most efficient from a visual aspect, I can provide feedback on what is technically feasible.
Designer: “You shouldn’t put icons on every option. This introduces a ‘Hick’s Law’ issue and the user will be way too overwhelmed.”
Engineer: “Every one of these terms can’t be edited inline. That would overload the DOM. We need to have one single modal that opens to edit a term for efficiency.”
Since us UX Engineers are focused on the birth and experience of the product, it would be difficult for us to also focus on other things such as search engines, queries, and performance speed which are totally front end responsibilities. We have a bit more invested in the handover from the designers. At work, I refer to this affectionately as the “front-front” end.
Here is a visual representation of what I’m talking about:
![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1000/1*yH7W8KEcD09-VUORdhg46Q.png)
In some companies, the UXD and UXE actually sit under the same umbrella in the org chart. In this situation, the UXE belongs to the UX Division instead of one individual software project dev team. The UX Division designs products to fit the brand of the company and serve several different software projects with wireframes, prototypes and controls. I think that this is the direction that UX is headed, and I’m totally into it.
In conclusion, I hope this information helps to explain and standardize the role and responsibilities of a UX Engineer. I am so thankful that I operate in this intersection of creative and technical skills. So can I be your designer? Sorry, but no. I’m not a designer. Can your designer and I combine our powers to make your product UX amazing? Anytime.