Journal tags:roles

We’re halfway throughthe third seasonofthe Clearleft podcastalready!

Episode three is all aboutdesign research.I like the narrative structure of this. It’s a bit like a whodunnit, but it’s more like a whydunnit. The “why” question is “why aren’t companies hiring more researchers?”

The scene of the crime isthis year’s UX Fest,where talks by both Teresa Torres and Gregg Bernstein uncovered the shocking lack of researchers. From there, I take up the investigation with Maite Otondo and Stephanie Troeth.

I won’t spoil it but by the end there’s an answer to the mystery.

I learned a lot along the way too. I realised how many axes of research there are. There’s qualitative research (stories, emotion, and context) and then there’s quantitative research (volume and data). But there’s also evualative research (testing a hyphothesis) and generative research (exploring a problem space before creating a solution). By my count that gives four possible combos: qualitative evaluative research, quantitative evaluative research, qualitative generative research, and quantitative generative research. Phew!

Steph was a terrific guest. Only a fraction of our conversation made it into the episode, but we chatted for ages.

And Maite kind of blew my mind too, especially when she was talking about the relationship between research and design and she said:

Research is about the present and design is about the future.

🤯

I’m going to use that quote again in a future episode. In fact, this episode on design research leads directly into the next two episodes. You won’t want to miss them. So if you’re not already subscribed tothe Clearleft podcast,you should get on that, whether it’s viathe RSS feed,Apple,Google,Spotify,Overcast,or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Have a listen tothis episode on design researchand if you’re a researcher yourself, remember that unlike most companies we value research at Clearleft and that’s whywe’re hiring another researcher right now.Come and work with us!

If you’re subscribed tothe Clearleft podcast,thenthe latest episodeis winging its way through the ether to your podcast software. The topic is one close to my heart:design engineering.

I wrote about this roleback in February. I think my fervour comes across in that post and you can probably hear it in the podcast episode too.

As ever, I end up asking the question, “So what exactlyisinsert topic of the podcast episode here?”

I’ve got some smart folks answering that question. There’s an excerpt fromTobias Ahlin’s talk at this year’s UX Fest. And when I interviewedAdekunle Oduyefor a previous episode on prototyping, we also discussed design engineering so I pulled out the relevant bits. But the bulk of the episode features the voice ofTrys Mudford.

As you can gather fromthe many posts on Trys’s blog,he has a lot to say on the topic of design engineering. Luckily for me, he says it all with a clear, articulate delivery—the perfect podcast guest!

This episode finishes with a call to action (oh, the synergy!). If, after listening to 23 minutes of discussion on design engineering, you find yourself thinking “Hey, I think I might be a design engineer!”, then you shoulddefinitelyhead along tothis job opening at Clearleft:

We’re currently looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production.

Have a listen toepisode two of season three of the Clearleft podcastand if you like what you hear, come and join us!

A little while back, I wrote about how much I like the job description of adesign engineer.I still have issues with the “engineer” part, but overall it’s a great way to describe a front-end developer who works on thefrontof the front end: the outputs that end users interact with: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If it’s delivered in a web browser, then it’s design engineering.

Perhaps you also prefer the front of the front end to the back of the front end. Perhaps you also like to spend your time thinking about resilience, performance, and accessibility rather than build pipelines and frameworks. Perhaps you’d like to work with like-minded people.

Clearleft is hiring a midweight design engineer.Perhaps it’s you.

If you’d like to use your development talents in the service of good design, you should apply. And remember, you’d be working for yourself:Clearleft is an employee-owned agency.

You don’t have to be based in Brighton. You can work remotely, although we’re expecting that a monthly face-to-face gathering will become the norm after The Situation ends. So if you’re based somewhere like London, that would work out nicely. That said, if you’re based somewhere like London, this might also be the ideal opportunity to make a move to the seaside.

You do have to be eligible to work in the UK. Alas, that pool has shrunk somewhat. Thanks, Brexit.

Perhaps you think you’re not qualified. Apply anyway. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Perhaps this role isn’t for you, but you know someone who might fit the bill. Please tell them. Spread the word.

We’d especially love to hear from people under-represented in design and technology.

Come and work with us.

It’s been just over two years since Chris wrote his magnum opus aboutThe Great Divide.It really resonated with me, and a lot of other people.

The crux of it is that the phrase “front-end development” has become so broad and applies to so many things, that it has effectively lost its usefulness:

Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about.

Brad nailed the differences in responsibilities when he described them asfront-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development:

A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.

A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.

In my experience, the term “full stack developer” is often self-applied by back-of-the-front-end developers who perhaps underestimate the complexity of front-of-the-front development.

Me, I’m very much a front-of-the-front developer. And the dev work we do atClearleftvery much falls into that realm.

This division of roles and responsibilities reminds me of a decision we made in the founding days of Clearleft. Would we attempt to be a full-service agency, delivering everything from design to launch? Or would we specialise? We decided to specialise, doubling down on UX design, which was at the time an under-served area. But we still decided to do front-end development. We felt that working with the materials of the web would allow us to deliver better UX.

We made a conscious decisionnotto do back-end development. Partly it was a question of scale. If you were a back-end shop, you probably had to double down on one stack: PHP or Ruby or Python. We didn’t want to have to turn away any clients based on their tech stack. Of course this meant that we had to partner with other agencies that specialised in those stacks, and that’s what we did—we had trusted partners for Drupal development, Rails development, Wordpress development, and so on.

The world of front-end development didn’t have that kind of fragmentation. The only real split at the time was between Flash agencies and web standards (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Overall, our decision to avoid back-end development stood us in good stead. There were plenty of challenges though. We had to learn how to avoid “throwing stuff over the wall” at whoever would be doing the final back-end implementation. I think that’s why we latched on to design systems so early. It was clearly a better deliverable for the people building the final site—much better than mock-ups or pages.

Avoiding back-end development meant we also avoided long-term lock-in with maintainence, security, hosting, and so on. It might sound strange for an agency to actively avoid long-term revenue streams, but at Clearleft it’s always been our philosophy to make ourselves redundant. We want to give our clients everything they need—both in terms of deliverables and knowledge—so that they aren’t dependent on us.

That all worked great as long as there was a clear distinction between front-end development and back-end development. Front-end development was anything that happened in a browser. Back-end development was anything that happened on the server.

But as the waters muddied and complex business logic migrated from the server to the client, our offering became harder to clarify. We’d tell clients that we did front-end development (meaning we’d supply them with components formed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and they might expect us to write application logic in React.

That’s why Brad’s framing resonated with me. Clearleft does front-of-front-end development, but we liaise with our clients’ back-of-the-front-end developers. In fact, that bridging work—between design and implementation—is where devs at Clearleft shine.

As much as I can relate to the term front-of-front-end, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I don’t expect it to be anyone’s job title anytime soon.

That’s why I was so excited by the term “design engineer,” which I think I first heard from Natalya Shelburne. There’s evena book about itand the job description sounds very much like the front-of-the-front-end work but with a heavy emphasis on the collaboration and translation between design and implementation.As Trys puts it:

What Iloveabout the name “Design Engineer”, is that it’s entirely focused on the handshake between those two other roles.

There’s no mention of UI, CSS, front-end, design systems, documentation, prototyping, tooling or any ‘hard’ skills that could be used in the role itself.

Trys has been doing some soul-searching and has come to the conclusion “I think I might be a design engineer…”.He has also written on the Clearleft blog about how well the term describesdesign and development at Clearleft.

Personally, I’m not a fan of using the term “engineer” to refer to anyone who isn’t actually a qualified engineer—I explain why in my talkBuilding—but I accept that that particular ship has sailed. And the term “design developer” just sounds odd. So I’m all in using the term “design engineer”.

Icanimagine this phrase being used in a job ad. It could also be attached to levels: a junior design engineer, a mid-level design engineer, a senior design engineer; each level having different mixes of code and collaboration (maybe a head of design enginering never writes any code).

Trys has written a whole series of posts on the nitty-gritty work involved in design engineering. I highly recommend reading all of them:

• I think I might be a design engineer…
• The designer and developer relationship
• Systemised design foundations
• Prototyping

We often have brown bag lunchtime presentations atClearleft.In the Before Times, this would involve a trip to Pret or Itsu to get a lunch order in, which we would then proceed to eat in front of whoever was giving the presentation. Often it’s someone from Clearleft demoing something or playing back a project, but whenever possible we’d rope in other people to swing by and share what they’re up to.

We’ve continued this tradition since making the switch to working remotely. Now the brown bag presentations happen over Zoom. This has two advantages. Firstly, if you don’t want the presenter watching you eat your lunch, you can switch your camera off. Secondly, because the presenter doesn’t have to be in Brighton, there’s no geographical limit on who could present.

Our most recent brown bag was truly excellent. I askedLéonieif she’d be up for it, and she very kindly agreed. As well as giving us a whirlwind tour of how assistive technology works on the web, she then invited us to observe her interacting with websites using a screen reader.

I’ve seen Léonie do this before and it’s always struck me as a very open and vulnerable thing to do. Think about it: the audience hasmoreinformation than the presenter. We can see the website at the same time as we’re listening to Léonie and her screen reader.

We got to nominate which websites to visit. One of them—a client’s current site that we haven’t yet redesigned—was a textbook example of how important form controls are. There was a form where almost everything was hunky-dory: form fields, labels, it was all fine. But one of the inputs was a combo box. Instead of using a nativeselectwith adatalist,this was made with JavaScript. Because it was lacking the requisite ARIA additions to make it accessible, it was pretty much unusable to Léonie.

And that’s why you use the right HTML element wherever possible, kids!

The other site Léonie visited was Clearleft’s own. That was all fine. Léonie demonstrated how she’d form a mental model of a page by getting the screen reader to read out the headings. Interestingly, the nesting of headings on the Clearleft site is technically wrong—there’s a jump from anh1to anh3—probably a result of the component-driven architecture where you don’t quite know where in the page a heading will appear. But this didn’t seem to be an issue. The fact that headings are being used at all was the more important fact. As Léonie said, there’s a lot of incorrect HTML out there so it’s no wonder that screen readers aren’t necessarily sticklers for nesting.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’re using headings, labelling form fields, and providing alternative text for images, you’re already doing a better job than most websites.

Headings weren’t the only way that Léonie got a feel for the page architecture. Landmark roles—likeheaderandnav—really helped too. Inside thenavelement, she also heard how many items there were. That’s because the navigation was marked up as a list: “List: six items.”

And that reminded me of the Webkit issue. On Webkit browsers like Safari, the list on the Clearleft site wouldnotbe announced as a list. That’s because the lists’s bullets have been removed using CSS.

Now this isn’t the only time that screen readers pay attention to styling. If you usedisplay: noneto hide an element from sight, it will also be unavailable to screen reader users. Makes sense. But removing the semantic meaning of lists based on CSS? That seems a bit much.

There are good reasons for it though. Here’sa thread from James Craigon where this decision came from (James, by the way, is an absolute unsung hero of accessibility). It turns out that developers went overboard with lists a while back and that’s why we can’t have nice things. In over-compensating from divitis, developers ended up creating listitis, marking up anything vaguely list-like as an unordered list with styling adjusted. That wasvery annoying for screen reader userstrying to figure out what wasactuallya list.

AndJames also asks:

If a sighted user doesn’t need to know it’s a list, why would a screen reader user need to know or want to know? Stated another way, if the visible list markers (bullets, image markers, etc.) are deemed by the designers to be visually burdensome or redundant for sighted users, why burden screen reader users with those semantics?

That’s a fair point, but the thing is…bullets maketh not the list. There aremanyways of styling something that is genuinely a list that doesn’t involve bullets or image markers. White space, borders, keylines—these can all indicatevisuallythat something is a list of items.

If you look at, say,the tunes page on The Session,you canseethat there are numerous lists—newest tunes, latest comments, etc. In this case, as a sighted visitor, you would be at an advantage over a screen reader user in that you can, at a glance, see that there’s a list of five items here, a list of ten items there.

So I’m not disagreeing with the thinking behind the Webkit decision, but I do think the heuristics probably aren’t going to be quite good enough to make the call on whether something is truly a list or not.

Still, while I used to be kind of upset about the Webkit behaviour, I’ve become more equanimous about it over time. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, there’ssomething that Eric said:

We have come so far to agree thatwebsites don’t need to look the same in every browsermostly due to bugs in their rendering engines or preferences of the user.

I think the same is true for screen readers and other assistive technology: Websites don’t need to sound the same in every screen reader.

That’s a really good point. If we agree that “pixel perfection” isn’t attainable—or desirable—in a fluid, user-centred medium like the web, why demand the aural equivalent?

The second reason why I’m not storming the barricades about this issomething that James said:

Of course, heuristics are imperfect, so authors have the ability to explicitly override the heuristically determined role by addingrole= "list”.

That means more work for me as a developer, and that’s…absolutely fine. If I can take something that might be a problem for a user, and turn into something that’s a problem for me, I’ll choose to make it my problem every time.

I don’t have to petition Webkit to change their stance or update their heuristics. If I feel strongly that a list styled without bullets should still be announced as a list, I can specificy that in the markup.

It does feel very redundant to writeul role= "list”.The whole point of having HTML elements with built-in semantics is that you don’t need to add any ARIA roles. But we did it for a while when new structural elements were introduced in HTML5—main role= "main",nav role= "navigation",etc. So I’m okay with a little bit of redundancy. I think the important thing is that you really stop and think about whether something should be announced as a list or not, regardless of styling. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer (hence why it’s nigh-on impossible to get the heuristics right). Each list needs to be marked up on a case-by-case basis.

And I wouldn’t advise spending too much time thinking about this either. There are other, more important areas to consider. Like I said, headings, forms, and images really matter. I’d prioritise those elements above thinking about lists. And it’s worth pointing out that Webkit doesn’t remove all semantic meaning from styled lists—it updates therolevalue fromlisttogroup.That seems sensible to me.

In the case ofthat page on The Session,I don’tthinkI’m guilty of listitis. Yes, there are seven lists on that page (two for navigation, five for content) but I’m reasonably confident that they alllooklike lists even without bullets or markers. So I’ve addedrole= "list"to someulelements.

As with so many things related to accessibility—and the web in general—this is a situation where the only answer I can confidentally come up with is…it depends.

CassiejoinedClearleftas a junior front-end developer last year. It’s really wonderful having her around. It’s a win-win situation: she’s enthusiastic and eager to learn; I’m keen to help her skill up in any way I can. And it’s working out great for the company—she has already demonstrated that she can produce quality HTML and CSS.

I’m very happy about Cassie’s success, not just on a personal level, but also from a business perspective. Hiring people into junior roles—when you’ve got the time and ability to train them—is anexcellentpolicy.Hiring Charlotteback in 2014 was Clearleft’s first foray into hiring for a junior front-end dev position and it was a huge success. Cassie is demonstrating that it wasn’t just a fluke.

Alas, we can’tonlyhire junior developers. We’ve got a lot of work in the pipeline right now and we’re going to need a full-time seasoned developer who can hit the ground running. That’s whyClearleft is recruiting for a senior front-end developer.

As lead developer,Daniellewill make the hiring decision, but because she’s so busy on project work right now—hence the need to hire more people—I’m trying to help her out any way I can. I offered to writethe job description.

Seeing as I couldn’t just write “A clone of Danielle, please”, I had to think about what makes for a great front-end developer who uses their experience wisely. But I didn’t want to create a list of requirements, and I certainly didn’t want to create a list of specific technologies.

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let’s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know,like a human.

Here’s what I wrote.I hope it’s okay. I don’t really have much to compare it to, other than what Idon’twant it to be.

Have a read of itand see what you think. And if you’re an experienced front-end developer who’d like to work by the seaside, you should apply for the role.

When I wrote abouta year of learningwithCharlotte,I made an off-hand remark in parentheses:

Hiring Charlotte was an experiment for Clearleft—could we hire someone in a “junior” position, and then devote enough time and resources to bring them up to a “senior” level? (those quotes are air quotes—I find the practice of labelling people or positions “junior” or “senior” to be laughably reductionist; you might as well try to divide the entire web into “apps” and “sites” ).

It breaks my heart to seeso many of my colleaguesprefix their job titles “senior” (not least because it becomes completely meaningless when every single Visual Designer is also a “Senior Visual Designer” ).

I remember being at a conference after-party a few years ago chatting to a very talented front-end developer. She wasn’t happy with where she was working. I advised to get a job somewhere else After all, she lived and worked in San Francisco, where her talents are in high demand. But she was hesitant.

“They’ve promised me that in a few more months, my job title would become ‘Senior Developer’”, she said. “Ah, right,” I said, “and what happens then?” “Well”, she said, “I get to have the word ‘senior’ on my resumé.” That was it. No pay rise. No change in responsibilities. Just a word on a piece of paper.

I had always been suspicious of job titles,but that exchange put me over the edge. Job titles can be downright harmful.

Dan recently wrote aboutthe importance of job titles.I love Dan, but I couldn’t disagree with him more in this instance.

He cite two situations where he believes job titles have value:

Your title tells your colleagues how to interact with you.

No.Talking to your colleaguestells your colleagues how to interact you. Job titles attempt to short-cut that. They do a terrible job of it.

What you need to know are theverbsthat your colleagues are adept in: designing, developing, thinking, communicating, facilitating…all of that gets squashed down into one reductionist noun like “Copywriter” or “Designer”.

AtClearleft,we’ve recently started kicking off projects with an exercise called “Fuzzy Edges” thatBoxmanhas been refining. In it, we look ahead to all the upcoming project roles (e.g. “Who will lead playbacks and demos?”, “Who will run stakeholder interviews?”, “Who will lead design direction?” ). Together, everyone on the project comes to a consensus on who has which roles.

It’s really, really important to clarify these roles at the start of each project, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that can’t be summed up in a job title. In fact, the existence of job titles can lead to harmful assumptions like “Oh, I figured you were leading playbacks and demos!” or “Oh, I assumed they were running stakeholder interviews!”, or worse: “Hey, you can’t lead design direction because that’s not in your job title!”

The role assignments can vary hugely from project to project, which is great. People are varied and multi-faceted. Trying to force the same people into the same roles over and over again would be demoralising and counter-productive. I fear that’s exactly what job titles do—they reinforce barriers.

Here’s the second reason Dan gives for the value of job titles:

Your title tells your clients how to interact with you.

Again, no.Talking to your clientstells your clients how to interact with you.

Dan illustrates his point by recounting a tale of deception, demonstrating that a well-placed lie about someone’s job title can mollify the kind of people who place great stock in job titles. That’s not solving the real problem. Again, while job titles mightappearto be shortcuts to a shared understanding, they’re actually more like façades covering up trapdoors.

In recounting the perceived value of job titles, there’s an assumption that the titles were arrived at fairly. If someone’s job title is “Senior Designer” and someone’s job title is “Junior Designer”, then the senior person must be the better, more experienced designer, right?

But that isn’t always the case. And that’s when job titles go from being silly pointless phrases to being downright damaging, causing real harm.

Over onRands in Repose,there’s a great post calledTitles are Toxic.His experience mirrors mine:

Never in my life have I ever stared at a fancy title and immediately understood the person’s value. It took time. I spent time with those people — we debated, we discussed, we disagreed — and only then did I decide: “This guy… he really knows his stuff. I have much to learn.” In Toxic Title Douchebag World, titles are designed to document the value of an individual sans proof. They are designed to create an unnecessary social hierarchy based on ego.

See? There’s no shortcut for talking to people. Job titles are an attempt to cut out one of the most important aspects of humans working together.

The unspoken agreement was that these titles were necessary to map to a dimwitted external reality where someone would look at a business card and apply an immediate judgement on ability based on title. It’s absurd when you think about it – the fact that I’d hand you a business card that read “VP” and you’d leap to the immediate assumption: “Since his title is VP, he must be important. I should be talking to him”. I understand this is how a lot of the world works, but it’s precisely this type of reasoning that makes titles toxic.

So it’s not even that I think that job titles are bad at what they’re trying to do…I think that what they’re trying to do is bad.