Even though our UX Team has been around for a while, they never seem to understand what is possible in our software, so end up designing something that we cannot accurately recreate from their Figma designs.
I often think their standards change over time so it’s hard to predict what they would come up with.
The UX Team asked what kind of formatting is possible in a Tooltip. You’d think they would know what is possible, and have plenty of old designs to refer to.
They said they had some upcoming projects that required tooltips containing large amounts of text; often with legal statements. They shared an example which had 3 sentences, then a Name, ID, Phone number, and address. So was a large amount of text in a tooltip, and some words were formatted.
I thought it wasn’t good UX to have loads of info inside a tooltip. Also, wouldn’t it be better to have that address somewhere where the user can copy and paste it? Seemed like a useful thing to have.
I often think it is good to evaluate the UX designs and give your own opinion on what’s possible to implement, but also suggest what would improve the user experience. You’d think the person employed in the UX team is the expert on user experience, but it’s best to not blindly accept it.
Cory House also seems to share this thought:
As a developer, I know I’m not a designer. But that doesn’t mean I should blindly implement designs.
I push back on designs that are:
- Insecure
- Confusing
- Incomplete
- Inaccessible
- Inconsistent
- Not performant
Assuring a good user experience is everyone’s job.
Cory House
More specifically, if we have an existing dialog, and the UX team decides to change what it says; you would think this is the simplest change possible. However, there could be a bit more to it than you would think.
I was explaining this concept to a Junior Developer. I was saying how I loved working with a Product Owner called Rob, who always asked “is that a hard thing to do?” no matter how trivial something sounded. He understood that there could be all kinds of crazy designs in the code.
In theory, it should never be hard. But sometimes adding more words means the words need to wrap onto the next line, and if the dialog hasn’t been coded to resize, then it might be a manual resize job. But if the “design view” is broken, then that makes it even more complicated.
The text might not just be set to specific words in the file where the control is. It could be dynamically generated then passed into another method, or maybe it even is set and read from a database. It’s still easy to change, but if you tried to search the source code for a specific word/words then you might not find it if it is dynamic or in the database instead.
I’m sure there have been times where, after investigation, you are like
“Rob, can’t we just keep the words as they are, I don’t have the skills to add a few more words!”.
Stranger Coding Tings 