Why I love being a Visual Design Engineer?

I have closely seen various roles in the Design Industry: Graphics Designer (Print Media), Visual Designer (Software), Motion Graphics Designer (Animation), Brand Designer, Typography Designer, etc. Also, while working in Software Development teams, I pith Product Managers, Frontend and Backend Engineers, Content Writers, Security Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers, and DevOps Engineers. Although I haven’t played all these roles first-hand, I was fortunate enough to work with and watch them closely to understand the genuine challenges of each. As a Visual Design Engineer, I highly respect the problem-solving skills needed in each role, but I find unparalleled excitement and satisfaction in my professional challenges. I keenly mention the word ‘Engineer’ in my role title. My understanding and self-definition of the “Visual Design Engineer” role is:

Crafting visual design solution proposals for web and/or mobile applications by applying Design Science, collaborating with other stakeholders to conclude the most feasible design solutions, delivering those on time, and seamlessly integrating this visual design process with the Software Engineering process.

Their responsibilities in detail are:

• Understanding requirements in terms of their impact on customers, user personas, and the business by working closely with product management.

• Creating a Design Strategy.

• Collaborating with all stakeholders to finalize user scenarios, tasks, information architecture, and navigation.

• Facilitating high-level solution ideation with the key stakeholders.

• Owning the iterations for wireframes and mockups.

• Participating in all types of usability testing and proactively communicating final design decisions with appropriate reasoning to respective stakeholders.

• Applying design science to define crisp and thorough visual designs, interaction designs, and related specifications to the software development team.

• Utilizing the best of the industry standard visual design tools and workflows that integrate well with other software development tools and workflows.

• Consistently ensuring that the visual design process is well embedded and in sync with the software development lifecycle, especially methodologies like Scrum.

• Validating the quality of development implementation against the provided design inputs during the Development Sprint.

• Actively participating in production monitoring and analyzing usage statistics.

Although the software product development lifecycle involves various stages, engineering teams worldwide have adopted ‘iterative progression with continuous feedback’ through methodologies like Scrum as a standard. This lifecycle contains Product Requirement Gathering and Analysis, Solution Ideation, Incremental Development and Testing, Continuous Delivery, and Monitoring. Two-week Sprints are a de-facto standard for incremental release cycles. Ideally, Scrum recommends maximum parallel execution from each skill function in the team. However, two weeks is short for a meaningful product increment to deliver with the utmost quality and confidence.

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To make a Sprint successful, the team must understand that a change in the product code is the most expensive part of the development cycle, and it better be supplied with superb clarity from the Product Management and the UX Team. A ‘Coupled Sprint’ pattern works best toward this aim, where the UX Sprint precedes every Development Sprint to provide the software developers with crisp change requirements, visual design, and interaction specifications. This does not isolate Visual Designs from Developers but instead expects them to be involved in each others' Sprints by closely watching decision-making and progress to provide timely inputs and validations.

I understand the term ‘Engineering’ as ‘following a highly reusable process that applies particular sciences and technologies to deliver supreme-quality produce every time consistently’. So ideally, when an engineer is asked to create a perfect metal sphere, she won’t just create one sphere but rather create a process and machinery that will deliver the same quality sphere every time it will be required in the future.

A Visual Designer who uses design science and technologies in such a way is a Visual Design Engineer.

As a result, engineers require less and less time for repetitive challenges, and they can focus on innovation and ingenuity during their next problem-solving.

My role expects me to work closely with product owners, other design team members, developers, and primarily customers. It is not that the other product development team members don’t need to do this, but I have to own the implementation design direction. Not only do I have to use my creative skills, but I also need to be effective with people interactions, conducting interviews, analyzing, negotiating hard while justifying design decisions, collaborating, and facilitating discussions. I feel immensely passionate about this role and the responsibilities it offers.

I plan to experiment with each of the roles a software development team offers. With a high-ownership attitude, every role will surely provide great satisfaction. However, my role still appeals best ‘to me’ due to my passion for the particular skills required here - through creativity and a disciplined approach, achieving a perfect balance between the two worlds a product serves - business and customers. At least, I can confidently say that it offers me a unique thrill.