It’s one of design’s key responsibilities. Developers need a sophisticated mental model of how it works, and how that gets displayed. Designers need a sophistic

It’s one of design’s key responsibilities. Developers need a sophisticated mental model of how it works, and how that gets displayed. Designers need a sophisticated mental model of what problems various users are trying to solve, and the best ways to communicate how the software can solve those problems, as well as state, etc. They’re both deep topics, and even as someone with significant professional experience in both design and development, I find it difficult to consider both things at once. Many things that are very important to design could be a serious PITA for developers. Many tools, such as front-end frameworks, that are important time savers in the dev environment are a serious PITA for designers to work around. Many designers don’t understand why seemingly small changes, maybe something that would require hand-rolling a common library component, could triple development time and cause huge maintenance issues. I’d say most developers don’t realize that their understanding of software architecture and construction is nearly useless when designing interfaces, workflows, etc., and that many of the folk ‘best practices’ they’ve learned about design are no more authoritative than any other folk knowledge computer users pick up. They sound like completely nontechnical gamers confidently wielding technical jargon to mis-explain phenomena people experience, and since none of the other gamers in the conversation know any better, it only bolsters their false confidence. Unfortunately, that alone explains why FOSS developers in independent projects repeatedly try and fail to make software that appeals to anybody other than software developers.