Zhang Xinxu: Front-end engineers should be responsible for user experience

The author | Zhang Xinxu

Edited by | Sun Ruirui and Deng Yanqin

User experience will be the core competitiveness of enterprises in the future, but at present, many new generation front-ends relatively lack the awareness of user experience, why? How to solve it? GMTC Global Front-end Technology Conference invited zhang Xinxu, a well-known CSS expert and front-end technical expert of Reading Group, to share a keynote speech entitled "The Dilemma and Break of User Experience", for more than ten years, he has been working in the front-end frontline, and has a lot of experience in user experience, this article is the transcript of the speech.

Hello everyone, it is a great honor to give you a keynote speech on user experience. This speech will not introduce how to do user experience, nor will it introduce the meaning and value of user experience, but as a front-end practitioner, talk about the dilemma and breakthrough of front-end technical personnel in user experience support.

Before you officially start the content, let's make a brief self-introduction.

My name is Zhang Xinxu, I work in the experience design department of Reading Group, as a front-end technical expert, I have been in the industry for more than ten years, have been in the front line, and since the beginning of the industry has been focusing on the field of user experience, in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Canvas these areas closely related to user experience have a lot of learning experience and experience, fortunately published 3 best-selling books, "CSS World", "CSS Selector World" and "CSS New World", known as CSS trilogy, these three books are still very good, "CSS World" is the first sales of new technical books in the People's Posts and Telecommunications Publishing House in 2018, "CSS New World" has been on the shelves for more than 3 months has been 4 prints, after reading it will feel that the professional is different.

Okay, let's start officially starting my sharing.

Let's start with the causes.

Some time ago I put a school recruitment written test question on the social platform, a written test question that has been used for many, many years, because the correct rate of this question is extremely low, there is no meaning of screening, so it was released, the result was very unexpected, received a lot of cynical comments, can only rely on Mongolia, no meaning and so on.

In the era when I entered the industry, font abbreviations must have a font size is common sense, a large number of article introductions, but also interviews often asked, now many people do not know, so as a technical tips to share out, the result of many people said no.

This made me realize: My lord, times have changed.

Another reason is the observation of a new group of post-95 front-end practitioners, that is, I found that this group of children, their mainstream frameworks, tools and libraries are very skilled, but the awareness of user experience is quite lacking.

Not to mention the high-level user experience support of accessibility, even many common sense for regular users do not know, or ignore.

For example, all clickable interactions must have feedback from pressing. If you carefully observe the mobile phone operating system, whether it is iOS or Android, all the lists, all the buttons will have feedback when clicked, whether it is color change, or vibration feedback, when pressed, there must be a reaction, this is the basic interaction common sense, otherwise the user is easy to be confused, click no response, do not know whether there is no function, or the device is dead, slow response.

I tried a lot of apps, such as WeChat, QQ, which did a good job, and then there are some national-level apps that I didn't pay attention to in this area, and I won't name it.

Then, such a simple and basic common sense of interactive experience is heavily ignored in the front end of the new generation, or completely unconscious, without the concept of this.

For example, the click area should be large, which is very important on the mobile side, but many front ends are completely based on the mood when implemented, the click area is irregular, or the area is very small, only considering the visual restoration effect, and ignoring the real click feedback area.

For example, the icon button on the right side, the final click area height is only 18px, although the function is OK, the test colleagues can not measure, but if the user is walking, or holding other things in the hand, often once clicked, because the click area is too small.

Ignore boundary exception handling, for example, low network speed, no data, script errors, flashbacks are not considered, only focus on the ideal state of implementation, but also feel good about themselves. Therefore, once the network speed is slow, there will be a long white screen, which can actually be optimized in a simple way.

Ignoring the meaning of HTML semantics and behavior in the user experience, so that everything is Div + JS, buttons are Div, link jumps are also Div + JS, rather than element + href, so as to ensure that even if JS loads slowly, JS exceptions, product functionality will not be problematic.

Of course, there are many others, decorative pictures using elements, hover drop-down lists without click event pocket bottom, resulting in problems such as difficult to use under touchscreen devices.

And the most intuitive is that the front-end development of the user experience direction is becoming more and more difficult.

So I started thinking, asking what could be like this? This leads to the next content, the dilemma analysis.

I've summarized it as follows: 4 reasons.

Let's start with the first one, front-end development.

The current front-end is no longer the front-end of the time I entered the industry, when the front-end was that little thing, the user experience occupied a large part, natural attention, learning more.

But now talk about the big front end, the front end of the tentacles is not only Web development, but also includes small programs, fast applications, as well as native end development, desktop development, etc., these projects to get started, behind the must understand some engineering things, need to understand Node related knowledge and so on.

There is a lot of content, huge and complicated, and there is a lot to learn, just like this front-end knowledge map shows, because there is too much content, I divided it into two to show, and the knowledge related to user experience is naturally slowly marginalized.

Framework and engineering to our development of the convenience, developers do not need to pay attention to too many details, can achieve qualified online products, but this development experience is sacrificed part of the user experience in exchange, for example, CSS automatically complete all private prefixes, the default is connected to the IE browser together, for mobile projects, this is redundant code, although can be set, but according to my observation, too many projects are so redundant, can be understood, unnecessary, put nothing, remove in case there is a problem.

Affected by many, the right to speak is large, driving the general environment to go in this direction, the technology stack is getting higher and higher, and the front end and the original positioning of this profession are getting farther and farther away.

The second is the development of equipment.

Now the software and hardware are already very strong, VS Code can run on the browser, those usual Web applications are more natural, so even if the code is poor, the implementation is verbose, the resource overhead is large, the product can run smoothly, there is no need to cut performance for the user experience as in the past.

Infrastructure developments have also made many UX-related technologies less important. For example, in the era when traffic was valuable, the front-end development product would use a double chart and a double chart. Large image in WiFi mode, low definition image under 4G.

Now there are not so many routines, are unlimited traffic, direct 3 times the figure to go up, anyway, the company does not care, users will not complain, I develop simple, easy maintenance, why not.

This also makes front-end technologies closely related to user experience unpopular and unpopular, such as good compatibility and traffic saving

element.

The third is Internet +.

That is, the combination of the Internet and traditional industries, this general trend has created a large number of front-end jobs, but these positions are basically the work model of Party B, which is the so-called outsourcing.

The company's revenue is the order volume, the first requirement, the deadline, the second requirement is that the function is intact, the service is stable, as for the product experience, the company of course hopes to be better, but often has a weak heart. After all, even if the experience is very general, it does not affect the making of money.

Therefore, for this kind of front-end developers who are widely engaged, they do not need you to pay attention to the user experience knowledge of the more details from the work, reducing the attention of the entire industry to the user experience.

The fourth is the characteristics of the user experience itself.

Usually 1-2 user experience is not meaningful, it takes the whole, hundreds, thousands of details to get better, in order to produce qualitative change effect.

This is a costly and lengthy process, the benefits are often invisible, not directly related, and there is a lack of support for most financially and labor-strapped enterprises.

The results of user experience optimization cannot be quantified, the effect is slow, and when promoted, employees themselves are not willing to do it, so they all do performance optimization. Because there is data, it is all about building wheels, not optimizing wheels. That's the way it is.

The above 4 points are the reasons why the user experience I analyzed is in trouble, so how to break the game?

I've also summarized 4 points: The first, at the enterprise level, is to value user experience as a company culture. Note that it is not a slogan or a slogan, but a real link to performance and promotion.

That is, employees spend a lot of time and energy doing a lot of user experience-related work, need to be recognized, and need to have the same promotion opportunities as colleagues who make wheels and introduce popular technologies.

Otherwise, useless, all rely on the pursuit of the technical staff themselves, if the company wants to have a good product experience, but the company does not have such genes, the only way is to recruit excellent people, willing to give money.

Second, it needs to be done at the national level.

For example, at the end of last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the age-appropriate regulations, accessibility support, and named some apps to do related experience support, which I think is very good.

The state does not come forward, let enterprises do these things spontaneously, it is difficult, because the development investment for niche groups and border scenes is an input-output ratio, or commercial value, not a cost-effective thing, the enterprise itself lacks such motivation, after all, business is profit-seeking, the need for the national level.

Later, when there are enough elderly people, I think it is possible to legislate to mandate accessibility support.

The third method is to wait, wait, etc.

Enough inner volume, the industry is no longer developing at a high speed, and the spirit of craftsmanship is there, because at this time the user experience will become the core competitiveness. This should be well understood, in a fully competitive, no monopoly industry, the user's final choice, must be the best user experience, and even for this user experience, a high premium.

The last method is to drive the big factory, the community to awaken, and spread through the power of the community.

In this matter, the power of the individual is extremely limited. I have a deep understanding of this, although I have a hard time through articles, sharing bitter words, teaching sincerely, user experience is very important, hope to improve the entire industry's emphasis on user experience, hope that the entire front-end industry blossoms, so many years of practice, although it has affected some people, but it has not developed as expected.

One is that people speak softly, individuals can not influence the development of industry trends, the second is that developers are also people, but also profit-seeking, if the environment is like this, that is, the company does not support, the team does not recognize, it is not helpful for their own promotion, everyone is impetuous, even if the blood is boiling, it will soon follow the current.

Therefore, it is also necessary for big factories to take the lead and the strength of the community.

Because many small and medium-sized enterprises will refer to the technology selection decisions, product ideas, and business models of large manufacturers, if large manufacturers are willing to make a strong voice in user experience and engineering practice, their influence is definitely much greater than that of individuals. In fact, there are a lot of leading companies doing this kind of thing now, which I think is very good.

The other is the power of the community, including organizing user experience-themed sharing conferences, collecting articles in the field of user experience, etc., because the inner direction of many developers is not clear, once they find community speech, or the wind direction is more and more close to the direction of user experience, it will cause their attention and inner awakening.

Finally, to sum up.

Due to social development, industry development and other reasons, wandering in the upper field, the current front end is gradually separated from the foundation and boundaries, making the front-end development user experience related awareness is weak, lack of knowledge has become a relatively common phenomenon, has been contrary to the original career pursuit of "front end".

This is not a problem in itself, but has played a pivotal role in the high development of the Internet. The problem is that the whole community environment and the atmosphere of speech will make many new front-ends mistakenly think that the current framework- and engineering-based development routines are front-ends, so that there is no development syndrome without Vue frameworks.

Once the rapid development of the industry stagnates and the product enters the competition user experience, this part of the developer may face the so-called 35-year-old career crisis, because the user experience is definitely not consciously able to do well, but requires a lot of front-end technology to do reserves.

Therefore, while paying attention to the implementation of functions, pay more attention to the foundation and bottom layer of technology, and think about what the core competitiveness of the front-end profession is, and the future may go more smoothly.