Design principles for hackers

I think by this time we all know certain principles of usability. We’ve all heard the “don’t let the users think” quote – make things obvious and self-explanatory. We should understand the importance if managing users’ attention etc. That’s how our designer friends work on the daily basis, they care for end-users, doing their best to give a pleasant user-experience.

But how this relates to us, backend engineers, whose code never gets nowhere near the frontend layer? It does. Whenever we write a line of code, our peers are the users. Struggling with every single line of code it’s not an experience they’ve been looking for when choosing their career route.

In this session I’ll get through some of the most important usability principles and show how we can reflect them in code. You might say it’s a clean code – true, but taken from a slightly different perspective. We all know the importance of code quality but some rules based on psychology and cognitive principles can give us a better answer to the why questions? Why is that the clean code appeals us.