log 02
What Does UX Mean When Your Users Are Engineers?
Most UX canon was written with a certain kind of user in mind. Someone who doesn’t read instructions. Someone tapping a screen on a bus. Someone who just wants to complete a task and get on with their day.
That’s a useful fiction. And it’s completely wrong for the users I design for.
My users are senior engineers. Platform architects. DevOps leads who have been living in terminals and YAML configs since before I knew what a component was. They have strong opinions about their tools. They will file a ticket to tell you your affordance is “unnecessarily opinionated.” They will prefer the raw API to bypass your UI entirely if it’s faster.
This is not a failure mode. This is the environment.
What this means practically is that almost everything I was taught about UX needs to be reweighted. Reducing cognitive load matters, but not at the cost of control. Progressive disclosure matters, but not if it buries power. Consistency matters, but engineers will notice if you’re applying a consumer-app design pattern to a workflow that doesn’t fit it.
The biggest shift for me was learning to design for trust, not just ease.
When a developer clicks a button that says “Provision Infrastructure,” they need to believe that what happens next is exactly what they think will happen. No magic. No surprises. Nothing abstracted so aggressively that the system becomes a black box.
This is a different design goal than “delight.” It’s closer to what a good CLI feels like: predictable, legible, fast, honest about what it’s doing and why.
Designing for trust is actually harder than designing for friendliness. It takes more craft to create an interface an expert believes in than one a novice finds approachable.
I’m still figuring this out. Some days I get it right and ship something that engineers quietly adopt. Other days I get a Teams message that says “can you just let us drop in json for our config?” and I have to sit with the fact that sometimes the right UX is no UI at all.
That’s a humbling place to work. I think it’s making me better.