Apologies if this is too much of a fuzzy question, I was wondering what people's thoughts were regarding the level of front-end development knowledge a UX professional (Experience Architect, Usability designer, Experience Designer - call it what you will) should have.
I'm guess I'm talking about situations where the two disciplines are handled by separate teams (UX team handle wireframes/designs/user journey and the front-end team actually do the coding).
Do you think the UX team can make do with a general level of front-end knowledge (basic understanding of HTML/CSS), or is it important for them to know the nitty gritty (semantic page structure, optimisation techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility etc)?
Should a UX team be able to imagine how their designs/wireframes will be interpreted by the front-end team and what mark-up/technologies are likely to be used?
Does only having a limited knowledge of front-end development make for poorer UX?
Are the finer points of FE development solely the concern of the front-end devs, or should it be a consideration for the UX team as well?
As I said, I know it's a bit of a fuzzy question, but I'm just curious as to how people view the respective skills of FE and UX teams, and how much blurring there should ideally be between the two.
Answer
As a UX person who works in a situation like you describe (UX creates the specs, FE implements them), I can say that it is vitally important that my team know what is/is not possible when designing a UI. If something's completely impossible, we do our stakeholders a disservice by proposing it.
On the other hand, given that only a few member of our team members have formal coding experience, we always work in tandem with our developers. Often we'll sit down with the development team prior to presenting our designs to the stakeholders and discuss the potential coding pain points.
In particular, I believe that it is vitally important that UX folks have (at least) a theoretical understanding of "FE-related things", including semantic page structure, optimization techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility, etc. Of course, there's always the viewpoint of Jared Spool; that in the future, all UX'ers will beed to be able to code (a viewpoint I don't necessarily agree with).
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