3 Reasons Why Learning To Code Makes You A Better Designer

[This topic has set off a firestorm of debate. That’s good. You can see my original post here. There have been thoughtful responses from Jennifer Tidwell, Hillel at Jackson Fish Market, Matt Nish-Lapidus, and Michael Angeles. This is my last post on the topic for a little while.]

Not every job will require that a designer know how to code. However, there are three reasons why learning to code makes you a better designer:

1. You’ll better understand the medium you’re working in. If you know what database queries will be faster than others, you can make the right response time tradeoffs. If you know what’s easy to code and what’s difficult to code, you can get your ideas implemented faster (and more of them, since development time is a limited resource.) Understanding what your medium does well and where isn’t as effective makes for more informed design decisions.
2. Knowing how to code helps you produce better prototypes. The best way to communicate a design idea to your teammates and clients is through an interactive prototype. Producing your own quick prototypes brings your ideas to life sooner, releasing that inner brilliance you’re carrying around and helping everyone see what your designs are really about.
3. Knowing how to code helps you identify bugs and flaws in the production code. As your team’s designs start to come to life, you can play an essential role of helping the developers isolate interaction problems, which means your end product will be the best it can be.

There’s been a lot of debate as to what languages designers should learn to code in. Based on these three reasons, I think it needs to be the languages used by the rest of the team, whatever they may be.

It’s clear from our research that designers who can code bring more to the team and, in the long run, see more of their brilliant work making it through the development process, to the user.