As our industry matures, there’s been an evolution in attitude toward design. From Google to startups, there’s a burgeoning belief that the competitive advantage lies in user experience. That said, most of us don’t work with trained user experience designers. On small or dev-focused teams, we need to be scrappy, and often it’s developers and engineers who make crucial user experience decisions—from workflows to errors to labels. Regardless of your team composition, having some rock-solid user experience principles will help improve the products you build and make your users’ wildest dreams come true.

Okay, maybe that’s a stretch, but they’ll definitely be glad you’re willing to give them some love.

Josh Clark and Mike Biglan (Twenty Ideas) give you some tools to use so that you, as a developer, can be a UX beast. They explore how to nurture curiosity as a means of understanding the user; how to leverage psychology, including decision science, in the process of developing workflows; how to communicate and argue well; and how to become a UX developer unicorn—winning friends and influencing people (including your boss) to become a more valuable and critical member of any team.

Prerequisite knowledge

• Experience developing products

What you'll learn

• Understand what UX is, why it's important, and how to think about UX front and center and work with experienced UX designers

This session was recorded at the 2019 O'Reilly Open Source Software conference in Portland.