Let's talk about the differences between a designer and a developer.
Now, you may know this already, but if you're just starting out, these terms are often confusing
and most people can decide whether they want to be a designer or a developer.
So let's have a look at these two fields and see what their differences are and also where they overlap,
because there is a lot of crossover.
But the main difference is that a designer is focused on the aesthetics, the experience of the user
versus a developer is focused more on the internals and the things that make a product work.
But let's get a little bit deeper into that.
You see, the first phase of building any product is the planning phase.
This planning phase is probably the most important.
This is where we decide and map the entire project.
How should the product look?
How should it feel?
What should I do?
This is also the part where you're usually interacting with the client and deciding what their goals
are, what the user's goals are, and planning out the project so that you have defined goals that you
want to achieve with your product.
From the planning phase, we go into the design phase and the design phase is all about using all the
information in the planning phase and making it into reality.
Usually you'd create something like site structure or mobile structure.
You'll have visual representation.
How will the product look?
What would the users see by the end of the design phase?
You usually know what the product should look like, what the product should do.
From there we get into the development phase.
The development phase is where we do the programming work.
We usually take all the assets and information that we've gathered from the previous stage.
That is the design phase and we try to implement it on a live website or live mobile app.
You might use things like ASML, Success and JavaScript to make the designs come alive so that they're
online.
They're on your phone.
Once you've build the product, you've developed the product, then we get into the exciting phase of
the launch phase.
This is where we deliver our product to the users, to the public.
Usually there is some polishing that we need to do, maybe some design tweaks, maybe some testing of
our site to make sure that it works properly.
But this is the critical part.
Once we launch our product, it doesn't end there.
The next step is the post launch, this is usually where we hand off the product to a client, but we
also monitor how the launch goes.
How do the users use the product?
Are there any issues?
Because most of the time when you create something, it's not 100 percent right from the beginning.
So instead you learn from your first version that you launched and then you iterate that is you improve
upon it.
You maybe do user testing and understand why users aren't clicking on this button, or maybe users are
confused how your product works.
And this turns into a loop because from the insights that you get after the launch, you can now start
improving your product.
You can start planning again, designing and developing again and launching again so that you get better
and better insights.
You improve the product over and over.
And this whole process continues, you can never really finish a product because a product can always
be improved.
But we're talking about designers and developers here, so where do they come in?
Well, a simplified version of this is that a designer is in charge of this part.
They're heavily involved with the planning phase of working with the client and deciding what the goals
are.
What do we want the users to do?
They're obviously heavily involved in the designs they need to design the product.
So it looks nice, it looks friendly, it looks usable.
It meets the client end user expectations.
But they're also involved in doing things like user testing, learning from the users and improving
their designs from what they learn.
The developers are mainly focused with this part.
They are usually the ones that receive the designs and start using things like HTML, CSS and JavaScript
to implement those designs into an actual working website or a mobile app.
They also might help with the launch by putting the code that they've created on a server monitoring
and launching the product.
But they're also going to encounter bugs in their code.
Maybe they've programmed something that isn't efficient or is incorrect and it creates bugs.
Well, they have to fix those as well.
So they're also involved in the post launch process.
So remember what I said at the beginning, design is all about these aesthetics.
You don't necessarily need to code because you're involved more at the beginning stages and later stages
of the product development phase.
But it doesn't hurt to know how developers use e-mail and JavaScript to create websites, which is why
we've included those sections later on in the course so that you also understand how you might want
to do this yourself.
But as a developer, you also might want to learn how to design, how to plan things, because then
you're able to understand the whole product better.
So these borders, although might look rigid right now, can overflow into each other.
But if you wanted just a guideline, this is it.
To be a great designer, you need to focus on these three things.
Sure.
ASML and access and some programming will help you.
You know, we've added a couple of extra videos in there for you to still see the whole picture.
All right.
This video is getting long.
So let's take a break and I'll see you in the next one.