Back of Design, Front of Design
A new way to think about different designers’ strengths
Allow me to share an idea that I have been turning over in my mind and inspecting from various angles. It encapsulates my own experience and touches on design roles, titles and how we collaborate. At the heart, it’s about how we might create conditions to do our best work. Let’s jump in.
For the past few years I’ve been working on Pictal Health, a startup to help people tell complex health stories visually so they can be heard, seen and believed. During this time I’ve also continued consulting in healthcare UX (User Experience) design & research, often with small yet mighty teams.
To me, being a designer is about solving problems through creative collaboration. It is still how I love to spend my days. Design frequently feels like play, and it involves periods of deep individual and collaborative flow. These things are good for our brains and our happiness. Design is a calling, and it’s fun.
After almost 14 years in this field I’ve observed how I work, how others work, and how we best work together. I’ve noticed a pattern: projects and products benefit from two distinct design-related roles. I’m calling them Back of Design, and Front of Design, inspired by terms used to describe developers — ‘Front End,’ ‘Back End,’ and ‘Full Stack.’ In the engineering world, these roles are well-understood.
Here is a table outlining some key strengths I see in Back of Design and Front of Design, with highlights showing where I love to spend time.
It appears from my highlighted chart that I am 100% Back of Design and 44% Front of Design. Thus I have always enjoyed pairing up with visually-oriented people, from grad school until today.
Now, as I become more of a tech elder, I have gravitated even more toward the Back of Design. I’ve enjoyed wrangling questions of “what should we do, and why?” And I’m more comfortable letting others take on “how should it look and act?” — though I can still happily lose track of time sketching ideas and building detailed prototypes.
Why do I love the the Back of Design so much? Many of these activities are about taming complexity: managing information and timelines, planning, helping visualize the invisible, bringing clarity, refining strategy, and overall creating order from chaos.
For me, taming complexity is not only a professional pursuit, but a personal one. In my non-work life, I am eternally raking leaves, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, tidying the house, and otherwise attempting to bring order to the world around me. It’s in my blood, my psyche, and perhaps my genes. Cleanse and organize the chaos! I harness this slightly obsessive, innate behavior and use it to my teams’ advantage. As one teammate recently said:
“[you’re an] ally in the fight against entropy.”
Another reason why I am drawn to Back of Design: I’ve had my mind expanded through years of grappling with the business model for Pictal Health. Now I am much more in-tune with the interrelation of design and business, which leans toward Back of Design.
Let us discuss Front of Design and Back of Design further, in a Q&A format for your convenience.
Is Back of Design the same as User Research?
Research and synthesis is critical to the design process, but it’s just one part of the Back of Design. Research is fun and social, and synthesis is satisfying and enlightening. Many people are happy doing this work full-time. I personally have resisted Research-only roles, because of my love of creative collaboration and the making part of design.
Is Back of Design the same as Product Management?
There’s quite an overlap between Back of Design activities and product management. Of course there are aspects of product management, like an extreme focus on data and analytics (or what Christian Crumlish has called ‘living in the data,’ in his excellent book Product Management for UX People) that are not a big part of the Back of Design.
At times in the past, I have paired with a Product Manager who took on select Back of Design activities, while I was more of a Full Stack designer. Over the two roles, we had the coverage we needed. I think a PM can successfully represent the Back of Design, especially if they are oriented toward doing research and visualizing the invisible.
I’ve dabbled in product management. I spent much of the last year writing feature briefs, helping phase work and build roadmaps. People have often called me the ‘glue’ that keeps a project together. Somewhere deep inside the egg yolk of my being, there lives a product manager eternally trying to peck its way to the surface. I’ve wondered about making the leap. But I hear that product managers spend all day context switching, and I worry about lack of time for deep work, whether individual or collaborative.
Does Back of Design = Design Strategy?
Maybe. Maybe that’s the answer and this article is irrelevant.
Does Front of Design = Product Design?
Product Design job descriptions seem to lean toward the Front of Design. Or else they seem to want a Full Stack designer who can do it all.
Can one Full Stack designer do it all?
Sure, in theory. Though I’ve noticed that people tend to have a certain orientation, a way of being and moving through the world, underlying talents and personality traits that tip them in one direction or the other.
For startups and tiny teams, one person may need to do it all. For my own startup, I do it all. But I don’t like working that way, and I believe the result will always be stronger with two complimentary design brains, working in concert through collaborative tension and flow.
Will AI replace more Back of Design or Front of Design jobs?
Sorry for the left turn, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Hard Fork, so AI is present in the forefront of my human encephalon, which is from the Greek word enkephalon meaning ‘what is inside the head.’
Others have considered the future of AI+Design much more than me. My guesses and inferences: all designers will start using AI daily, to some extent. Design busywork will be automated. UI best practices will be codified into tools and plugins that will generate end-to-end experiences that can then be themed or tweaked. Design system creation and management will be much more automated. These are mostly Front of Design things. And, basically all Back of Design work can be supported in some fashion with AI. I’ve heard smart people (I can’t recall who, but probably on Lenny’s Podcast) say that for some semblance of job security, we should focus on more strategic product work with AI as copilot.
But in this design dystopia, how do we keep the soul of our work intact? How do we ensure creative collaboration thrives? And what if we love and are uniquely suited to the work that is being automated away? Questions for another time.
Back of Design / Front of Design — is this even helpful?
While this construct helps me understand myself better, others may not see their skills and interests fitting neatly into these categories. Also, it’s possible that this is simply a regurgitation of old ideas; for example, as I started my career, it was common to pair an interaction designer with a visual designer. “It’s been done.”
But I hope I have at least communicated the value of the Back of Design, a skillset that seems to have become less visible or less formalized over time.
As one past Front of Design collaborator said:
I was spoiled by our experience together. I now feel like every project needs a you and a me on it.
Well, you know me, I welcome all feedback. Let me know what you think.
I would like to call out (in no particular order) a handful of talented, baller Front of Design past collaborators, thought partners and friends, some of whom are no longer in that type of role. Regardless, I would choose you for my design/product island.
Taeho Ko, Ty Saunders, Alli Berry, Brian Pelayo, Jackson Latka, Corey Machanic, Jeremy Beaudry, Don Naylor, Patricia Meirinho
