Recently I had a chance to watch the video of a talk given by Jonathan Berger, given at the recently concluded Agile UX NYC 2012 Conference. In his talk, Jonathan made reference to a designer who boldly claimed: “We don’t hire designers who can’t code.” This statement got me thinking about my own personal experience as a designer within the Jamaican market who’s been forced to learn to code because no one would hire me as a web designer if I couldn’t also develop the user interfaces of these websites using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I always thought that being forced to learn to code was a bad thing within our local web design industry, because I quite frequently prefered the thrill of design rather than spending all day looking at a screen filled with boring text. This coupled with the fact that many of my fellow web designers in other regions of the world were not forced to code – they’d constantly speak of designing comps and handing them over to developers who would handle the coding aspect of things. I’d constantly be perturbed at the fact that I had to be wearing so many hats in order to produce a digital product, while others overseas had fun all day doing what they loved – making things useful, usable and delightful through the process of design. I thought forcing a designer to learn to code was actually a weakness of Jamaica’s web design industry, because I thought it would take away from the time, energy and love that we could put into creating wonderful UI’s, but boy was I wrong!

It turns out that Jamaica’s web design industry may have had it right for all these years, because in recent times there have been articles popping up all over the web with persons advocating the benefits of designers who can also code as well as the need for designers to learn to code. Some even go as far as calling them ‘super designers.’ Interestingly enough, I also read an article that suggested that companies like Quora and Facebook follow a policy where their designers are also coders, and we’ve all seen the great user experience results yielded from the products produced by such companies.

After all these years of being forced to develop my coding abilities along with my talent for design, I’ve grown to appreciate being able to code, in fact sometimes I actually prefer coding than designing! However, design is my first love so please don’t tell anyone I said that! ;)

Among the many benefits of  being able to code is the fact that it enables me to bring my design vision to life in the exact way that I envisioned it; It allows me to work more closely with teams of developers and to understand their language when communicating throughout the product development cycle, and best of all, it enables me to have a better understanding of the medium in which I’m designing – how it works, and what’s possible, so that I won’t end up wasting valuable time designing ideas that cannot be implemented.

In his talk on Code Literacy at Agile UX NYC 2012, Jonathan Berger gives several benefits of a designer being able to code, and he also shares some bits about his personal journey of being a designer who has learnt to embrace coding. Please watch it and see if you can identify with any of his experiences:

What are your views? Do you think designers should learn to code? Is it reasonable for employers to demand that their designers know how to code?