Just because I'm mostly a back-end (read database and business logic) developer doesn't mean that I don't care about UI or UX. Mom drilled the ethic of putting myself in another person's proverbial shoes into me pretty early-on.
For what I usually do, that plays out in well-organised data-sets, scads and scads of validation code, and fighting tooth-and-nail for the absolute rock-bottom minimum of data passing back and forth between client and server. Mostly do-able...assuming you aren't double-teamed by Marketing and Legal. (Pro Tip: Know your bandwith/hosting costs cold, have your calculator handy, and put the onus squarely on those noseyparker byte-hoovering data-slobs to quantify the ROI. Preferably in front of upper management. Chances are, they can't and won't. And they'll think twice before doing it again. Alas, twice isn't always enough times. Lather, rinse, repeat.)
While my world is largely ruled by, well, rules, front-end designers and developers wrestle with the container-of-fuzzy-spaghetti-from-the-back-of-the-fridge otherwise known as the modern human psyche. More power to them. I've wrestled heisenbugs a-plenty (losing more than a few rounds, mind you), and still would rather re-fight every single one of those battles than allow a random user to type a DateTime value as plain text. Seriously.
Thus I'm a starry-eyed fan of design folks like Don Norman, Mike Monteiro, Erica Hall, and Luke Wroblewski. (Viktor Papanek's magnum opus has been on my wish-list for years, but it's been out of print for so long. Some day...) Also behavioural psychologists like Daniel Ariely and Daniel Kahneman. Likewise Clay Shirky when it comes to pointing out the differences in how humans act individually vs. in groups (absolutely critical in this connected age).
The single most important take-away from all this reading is: Thou shalt make it easy for thy user to do The Right Thing(TM). (In an ideal world, thou shalt make it statistically impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing, but -- Mike Monteiro excepted -- nobody in this crowd is rocking anything like Charlton Heston's beard from The Ten Commandments, so...).
And yet, for all that reading--in most cases multiple readings because it's all crazy-good--I find its limits no farther away than the local co-op grocery store.
Several years ago, I had both the keep-you-on-your-toes challenge and the genuine pleasure (because they shouldn't be mutually-exclusive) of holding down the account for a household-name client. The kind of client that was flush enough to send holiday gifts to their vendors. As a matter of corporate policy, I donated gifts like the cheese-knives and cutting-board to the office kitchen. (Being the Patron Sinner of the office's "liquid potlucks," what else would I do with that kind of thing, I ask you.)
The two shopping bags were another story. Lovely things, those. Two sets of handles, for shoulder or hand. Constructed from the recycled (PET) plastic equivalent of Grade-A Wakandan vibranium, IMLTHO. (Or adamantium -- take your pick, Marvel fans.) Crossed with a Tardis to boot. They're awesome. Especially when compared to the branded "resusable" bags hawked by the local grocery stores. Two of which (in our household, at least) have been known to blow their seams in less than a month...one on the very next use.
So I, being a back-end developer aspiring to minimise my UI/UX sins, attempt to do the right thing by making it easy for my user (a.k.a. the cashier) to do the right thing. Which means the double-decker short cart rather than the monolithic monstrosities with the turning-radius of a battleship. Heavy stuff on the bottom (because Physics, nat'cherly) and little and/or smooshable stuff on top.
At the checkout line, the first thing dropped onto the conveyor-belt is the bags. With the awesomer ones unmistakably on top of the not-so-awesome ones. Then the groceries, carefully graded (front to back on the belt) from heaviest to lightest. The affordance couldn't be plainer: Put the stuff closest to you in these-here bags up-top.
Yet, well over 90% of the time (in my observations), the cashier dumps the awesome bags off to the side and loads the flour, the shortening, the canned goods, etc. into the el-cheapo bags and resorts to the industrial-strength bags only when the others have run out.
Why? Because when it's the difference between the known and the unknown, afforances don't mean jack. As far as the average customer and cashier are concerned, all branded "reusable" (in my case, the quotation-marks are there for good reason) bags are churned out by the same no-name offshore factory. (And, for all I know, they are. Booyah, race-to-the-bottom globalism, yo.) The default option -- i.e. the ultimate affordance -- is the known quantity. It's the same reason that the "Save" button still looks like a 3.5" floppy disk and not a USB flash drive or an SD card. The exact same reason.
Which, while it's frustrating as all get-out, is deeply humbling. It's why I consider darned near every UI/UX developer on the planet grossly underpaid. As much as non-programmers puzzle (perhaps shudder) at the inner workings of computers, I embrace them as fundamentally logical -- ultimately knowable. In contrast, stepping into the world of human-computer interaction means trading the near-certainties of Boolean logic for the fuzzier approximations of statistical norms...clouded by the occasional chaos of lizard-brained mob-thought. [shudder]
Alas, my patron-client must have custom-ordered the awesome bags, because they have no manufacturer's tag. (They're a dark olive green, slightly beveled bottoms, two sets of handles -- can ya do a girl a solid here, Intertubes??? Halp.) Or I'd cheerfully solve my weekly problem by ordering a few more. ("Thou shalt make it impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing," remember???)
The other, cheaper, solution, of course, would be to just tell the cashier to use the weirdo bags. Except that cashiers are basically just trying to optimise for ringing up as many sales as possible without getting yelled at. At the risk of sounding ancient, I'm old enough to remember when ringing up sales (and making small-talk about the weather) was all cashiers had to do. Another person not only bagged your groceries, but also loaded them into numbered tubs so that a third person could help load them into your car (if you so chose). Contrast that with the utter faceless dickishness of Home Depot, et. al., and their self-checkouts, and you'll understand why I refuse to participate in any further dehumanisation.
Ultimately, computer programming, like any discipline, has to push the boundaries to stay relevant. In the 1990s, we had the waggish adage of "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away." And while I sometimes wonder whether an on-demand "serverless" world of ginormous anything-goes NoSQL databases and spaghetti-nets of asynchronous-microservices-du-jour will trash back-end coding as a legit. discipline, I have no such worries about UI/UX developers. Those boundaries, however mystifying to a left-brainer like myself, are vast, but relatively immutable. But certainly no less challenging for all that.
