UX Engineer - the profession of the future

It’s hard to find a good interface developer. Many people in the Bay Area think so. Outstanding interface engineers are really very few, and those units that exist usually already have several proposals. And this at a time when many people have problems finding work. You might think that developers will look for a continuation of a career in the field of user interfaces.

But it is not so easy, because for such work you need to have a special set of skills. An unusual combination of the skills of a confident developer, decent user experience, and the ability to quickly work in Photoshop. Real UI engineers need to understand how something works to make it elegant, comfortable, and useful. They are worth their weight in gold and in most organizations are of great importance, being the final authority on how to better implement any functionality, and which of the functions really should be added to the final product.

The need for good interface engineers becomes the number one challenge for developers. The main tasks of developing internal functionality can easily be passed on to the outsourcers (from India and other countries). The skills needed to develop excellent application interfaces that will be comfortable and appealing to users need the attention to detail that comes after developing large projects, as well as an understanding of local culture.

The owner of one of the outsourcing companies has admitted that it is much better when the work of the ux-engineer has already been completed by the time the order is received than to force its own developers to work on it. In other words, outsourcing of user interfaces is undesirable.
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So why will the need for such specialists continue?
One of the most important trends of recent times has been the fact that companies have begun to pay attention to the field of user experience. They know that this needs to be dealt with closely in order to take their place in the market, and that serious professionals in this field will be needed to get a good result. The most useful in this matter are UI-engineers who can turn the process of creating frameworks and visual design into an exciting experience. In the end, you get a solution that is perfect for your users.

The introduction of HTML5, according to promises, will allow you to implement broader functionality and do more interesting things with the help of HTML, which are now done using graphics. No more rounded corners, falling shadows and other "beautiful" workarounds through jQuery and stupid CSS. HTML5 will not only provide faster loading of pages, but also speed up product development.

The jQuery framework certainly helps to make many things easier, but to work well with it, you will need almost as much knowledge of Javascript as you would only use it. You need to understand well where and how it can be used and how to achieve good user experience with it, for all users of your product.

Who will need a backend developer when most of the work can be done on end devices using REST and AJAX calls? The MySpace platform is an excellent example: most of the calls to get data are from Javascript. Browsers are increasingly supporting standards Javascript (and the complete idyll comes when Internet Explorer version 6 disappears over the horizon). So AJAX is becoming the mainstream technology for the majority, and users expect that many things will be done without reloading the pages. For example, many have become accustomed to the fact that the search is performed on the fly, and much on the page is updated instantly. Google Instant and others like it are the beginning of a wave of future web services.

Whatever they would say about the iPhone, but in the coming years, the Android OS will surely surpass it. Native apps are great, but they are not cross-platform, which is necessary on mobile devices. Engineers will be able to create impressive applications with excellent interfaces. And in this they will be helped by ux-professionals. Using modern cross-platform technologies, they will help you easily try to prototype a product on several devices, without spending a lot of time developing "native" applications for each of them.

When most of the data is transmitted using Javascript, the need for backend-engineers slowly disappears. More and more projects are using cloud computing, which allows companies to easily scale their applications and get rid of the development team that is optimizing the code, trying to get it to work at least a little faster. Finally, development costs have fallen, since many modern technological solutions make it possible to bring the product to the market much faster than before.

via usabilitycounts