steve kwan user experience designer

HTML Engineering

(July 7th, 2006 - 12:29AM)

Not too long ago, my roommate told me he was going to learn Web design. After reading about HTML tags for half an hour, he was prancing around the house and calling himself a genius for "mastering" it so fast.

I remember being there. When I first got into HTML, I thought it was so ridiculously simple. But of course, I now know that there's much more to Web design than what you can learn in your first month.

I think that all aspiring Web developers go through several natural stages of progression in their careers. In the beginning, they think Web design is just about HTML. Then they learn about peripheral technologies like CSS and Server-Side Includes. But after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, they learn that good Web design isn't about these technologies at all: it's about people. All that matters is the people who you are serving; the product you're making is just a means to an end.

I've come to the unlikely conclusion that Web design can be harder than software engineering. My background is in the latter - geeky stuff like C++ and Java. If you'd told me back in 2000 that building websites was harder than building software, I would have laughed. After all, how can something as simple as HTML be harder to handle than the complexities of C++? I can think of two reasons.

1. Software engineering draws primarily on computer science, and perhaps mathematics. But Web design draws on many disciplines, including cognitive science, graphic design, computer science, commerce, marketing, and business communications. It's relatively easy to find an expert in computer science, but good luck finding someone who's truly mastered half a dozen different disciplines.
2. Software engineering is ultimately about product development, whereas Web design is ultimately about people. I think this is starting to change as more software companies get into iterative and user-centred development, but for the time being software engineers don't require the same level of communications skills that Web designers do. Software engineers still work primarily with computers, while Web designers get much more interaction with clients. And as we all know, machines are much more predictable than human beings.

There was a time when I would have scoffed if someone called himself/herself an "HTML Engineer." Now, I'm not so sure. The technology may not be complex, but the other factors involved in Web design can make it closer to an engineering discpline than one would expect.