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I'm in a coop doing some sort of full stack web development. I have experience in the arts, so I agreed with my boss to help with some elements of the front end/ui design in the interview with the idea that I'd still be programming for the most part.
However after working here for a bit I've learned that the company seems to be lacking a front end designer, and I'm beginning to fill that roll more and more. This has been making me incredibly depressed, since it's not what I want to do as a career, but I'm having a really hard time breaking away from it.
The developers so far have been creating the front end with almost no direction or planning. No thorough sketching, no wireframes, no prototypes, no style guides, no comps. They wouldn't get real feedback from the client until they made something close to the final product. And since I know how important these things are for developing the front end smoothly, I'm finding it hard to let go and follow the other developers' process instead of implementing these methods myself (especially since my boss is wanting me to help with this sort of thing).
At first I was a bit excited, because I was filling a role that was sorely needed, and could potentially use it as leverage to get an actual job at the company. It's not that I'm doing design related work 100% of the time, I'll still work on some assignments related to client and server side code, however it's not as thorough as it'd be if my coop were completely focused on the programming aspect of things. I might be running the risk of wasting too much of my time doing things that probably won't help me much if I decide to do anything beyond front end development, if that.
I'm not so sure what to do anymore. Should I start playing ignorant so I get more programming assignments vs design ones? Am I doing the responsible thing by helping to fix the team's workflow like this? They might extend my contract to a full year; if they offer should I just decline and leave?
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This is an easily solved problem. When there is silo'd knowledge/experience, you spread it through the team. This involves a process change. First, it sounds like you guys need to change the way you capture and assign work. You should have a card wall with dev tasks broken into appropriately sized chunks that can all be played in parallel. Now normally with card walls you have columns like "Refinement", "Ready for Dev", "In Dev", "In QA", "Accepted", or something like that. The trick here is that you have to get devs assigned to cards in the "refinement" step and require that UI design be done as part of the refinement step, including mockups and maybe even client sign-off. The same dev/pair then walks the card through the rest of the stages until QA gets it. Or something like this. You can fill in the blanks, I don't know your business or team.
tl;dr: You forcefully distribute design work across all devs by making it a part of the regular development process.
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>>18609680
This seems like pretty solid advice, thanks. I need to find a way of going about it though. The biggest issue is that I'm the most junior person on the team, so I can't say what their reaction would be if I were to ask for that kind of change to the process (via something like cards). They also seem a bit reluctant themselves to pick up on the design process, however maybe I can sway them a bit if I can prove how useful it is to do things as I'm currently doing them.
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