Why We Hire UI Engineers on the Design Team

This Happy Cog article by Stephen Caver perfectly encapsulates why we hire UI Engineers on the design team at Optimizely (as opposed to the engineering team). We want the folks coding a UI to be involved in the design process from the beginning, to understand the design system that underlies a user experience, and to be empowered to make design decisions while developing a UI. Successful designs must adapt to various contexts and degrade gracefully. The people most qualified to make those kinds of decisions are the ones writing the code. As said in the article, “In this new world, the best thing a developer can do is to acquire an eye for design—to be able to take design aesthetic, realize its essential components, and reinterpret them on the fly.” By embracing this mindset in our hiring and design process, we’ve found the end result is a higher quality product.