Speaking Developer

Textile 2024 week 17 note

I might be doing some more speaking at another developer conference or two quite soon. This is a good, but slightly uncomfortable spot to be in when you’re a designer. You’re typically talking a different language to what is hopefully a crowd of interested people. That means you need to assume very little. I’ve done my fair share of speaking to non-designer crowds, everything from teacher trainers in central Africa to the European Union Parliament, but developers are something different. When you’re talking to people who’s job is to build things that have to work, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room or even necessarily interest in learning about things that don’t relate to that. Thinking through what I could talk about, and how we’ve been building and learning and building and learning how Tableland Studio should work, I think we might have something that might not require so much translation and explanation. That is because in this case developers are the users. This is in itself slightly different from most design content as well, because there isn’t necessarily a regular consumer using an app or service, but a developer using an app or service to building another app or service. The differences are quite huge, but a lot of themes are the same. How do you understand what people want to do? What are the right questions to ask and to whom? How can we learn what is really going on in many different ways? All of these and more are “design thinking” but with a very specific and higher order user set. It’s all about thinking about the user as builder for another user. Slightly abstract, but a user designers like me need to have empathy with regardless.