Why you need design engineers on your team.
photo by Jide Lambo

We have heard of the term “Unicorn designer” and this is someone who has design skills and also quite comfortable with writing codes. Having someone like this in a team can act as a connector or collaborator between the design and engineering team. This can help achieve critical business solutions faster.

The name of the discipline is design engineering, and a design engineer is someone who specializes in the intersection of the disciplines of designing and engineering. — by Natalya Shelburne.

People with these skillsets often go with titles like Design Engineer, Frontend Designer, Design Technologists, and UI or UX Engineer.

Design engineers can contribute by doing user research, wireframes, mockups, prototype with pen/paper, prototype with UI design tools, and even develop interactive prototypes using frontend codes.

A design engineer can demonstrate a healthy business value because they can quickly experiment, present, and test ideas from the design process through to the development process. This also entails having a healthy collaborative soft-skill in order to get the best result.

Someone with these skillsets can set up a design system, document patterns, build responsive UI components for major screen sizes, guide engineers to follow UI specs, and best practices. They can be very useful collaborators because they’re bi-lingual and can easily communicate their ideas, and also understand their engineering team mate’s views. They know when a design is not feasible to code and can also guide engineers on specific CSS to achieve certain experiences.

Having a solid foundation and knowledge of the right tools needed for designing and engineering an experience can help the team prototype ideas fast and develop useful business solutions.

In one of my past job experiences, I paired up with engineers. I would conduct user research so we can find out our customer’s needs and also connect them to our business’s goals. In some cases, I was able to create a low-fidelity paper prototype, and the whole team could communicate their ideas by either making changes or sketching their ideas. I also designed prototypes using tools like InVision or Craft and demonstrate the user flow. Working closely with my team as a design engineer helped me present designs very early, get regular feedback, and allows me to iterate faster.

I also provided interactive prototypes, which are built with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or other JS frameworks. The benefits of using this approach are:

it is closer to the end experience.

prototypes can use user or mock data via API to get the entire user’s experience.

fast iterations can be made, tested, and the code is almost ready to ship.

Below is a quick walk-through on how to create an interactive prototype:
['Jide Lambo.']
['Designer', 'Collaboration', 'Prototyping', 'Front End Development', 'Engineer']