this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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From where I sit, it seems like frontend is closer to being a graphic designer than on backend.
Then you haven't developed a non-trivial user interface before.
I've made UIs, and at least one I'd say was complex, but it was also really ugly. What am I missing?
This wasn't a put-down, BTW. I couldn't be a graphic designer either.
Making good UX is fucking hard. I say UX because making it good is really about the user’s experience, not graphic design. An ugly front end can be good if it’s intuitive and easy to use. But a visually gorgeous front end will still be garbage if it’s clunky and confusing.
It’s really something you have to experience to fully understand. Ultimately it comes down to this: front ends have to deal with people, backends only have to deal with computers. So backends can be cleanly organized and well structured. Applying backend design principles to a front end will get you a CRUD interface - something that’s usable but no one really wants to use.
You need to be able to do layout design to do good ux. The visual presentation is a critical aspect of usability. Also backend code needs to be consumable future readers (including the author). That's something that is very often lost and you get terrible unorganized backed code.
This is kind of what I meant. Appearance isn't just colours and alignment, but also things like flow, organisation and layout. I can make the data theoretically accessible, but with all that stuff I'm completely out of my depth.
Write-only code can be an issue for either, while on the other hand complexity theory, big data structures and high math make me think backend.