Is web development a career with long-term prospects? If we look at it from a social perspective, the answer seems to be a very clear yes. Digital platforms are booming in all media: computers, tablets, smartphones… The language of the Internet has evolved to allow the development of applications in the browser, apparently relegating static, impersonal websites to archaic status.
These digital developments are inextricably linked to the way we use the Internet today. Ten to fifteen years ago, the democratization of the Internet began. Today, Internet access is the norm in the home. Those who are not connected at home are the exception because digital plays a very important role in our daily lives.
From the beginnings of the web to the digital revolution
The Internet has brought about a powerful metamorphosis in our society. From the way we look for information to the way we book our evening restaurant, we naturally have the reflex to open a web page rather than an encyclopedia or a Michelin guide.
Digital is booming and its expansion is not about to be stopped: the digital revolution has already considerably changed business processes, as well as the profiles sought by companies. Developers have pride of place in this teeming emergence of new technologies.
The observation is obvious: the digital professions are buoyant and web developers have a bright future ahead of them. Specialists in popular new frameworks, in particular, are particularly in demand and may claim great job opportunities.
Development, more accessible and less expensive
In the early 2000s, software licenses, servers, bandwidth were expensive investments for web development Company in Lahore, and companies needed solid funding to bring a viable and profitable digital product to market.
Right now, the costs have dropped significantly. The initial investments are much less important, offering new opportunities to small and medium-sized structures, and opening the door wide to start-ups.
Cloud infrastructures, open-source frameworks, and the largely contributory spirit of the Net make it possible to develop without investing heavily, provide that you have the skills in development and design. This has enable a new generation of developers to design digital products and applications faster and more simply.
UX at the heart of product development
There is a major consequence to this technological swarming: . The choice and the diversity brought to the market make the consumer all the more demanding, . Whether it is an individual or a company.
In fact, if it has become relatively easy to design a high-performance product with few resources, on the other hand, it is difficult to position yourself on the market.
With digital transformation and market competitiveness, . The user is at the center of product development internet standardization and cost reduction expand digital opportunities. The digital market follows the metamorphosis and has grown exponentially. Software and applications abound and offer more and more choices to consumers, whose numbers are growing rapidly. Productivity demands innovation in technology and ergonomics. This is why product design base on agile or lean concepts has been so successful in recent years. Static design and development methods have become obsolete because they do not offer the flexibility of iterative approaches.
There is no longer any question of spending days training their teams in the use of software: . It is an investment of time and money that companies no longer want to bear because they too are subject to performance pressure. We can see it in the way the Agile philosophy has spread to different areas of web development.
In fact, companies expect from a digital product:
- An intuitive interface
- Ease of use
- Customize features to their business problem
- Low investment in employee training
- A fluid, fast and collaborative product
To get the ball rolling, designers need to get the user directly into the development loop. On the other hand, this requires changing the technical ways of proceeding: .There is no longer any question of developing a prototype by involving back-end and front-end developers and designers. It would be too long, too expensive.
Front-end development and user interface design integration
Opportunities for development teams: the accessibility of new technologies, from frameworks to software suites, . Facilitates prototyping by reducing the time spent on the product development and assurance phases. They even tend to eliminate this phase thanks to the emergence of software such as Sketch, Figma and even inVision and Marvel in the market.
These collaborative tools make it possible to involve the various design players from the first phases of the project, and place work on the interface at the forefront. As a result, the close collaboration between developers (mainly front-end) and designers is gradually changing the profile archetypes expect from front-end developers, but also from designers.
This convergence is also driven by improvements in graphics production tools and how graphics teams use them. In addition, the democratization of frontend development frameworks, . Such as React or Node.js, opens up the possibility of automating frontend development with design and prototyping tools:
- Squarespace has, for example, already develop such a process for basic website design.
- Webflow offers a drag & drop environment capable of creating interactive content for websites
- Atomic and Origami offer interesting solutions with components, animations and preconceive data.
All of these tools are design first, .But many allow users to edit or add editable code to refine their product. Imagine what this software will look like in five years!
Design-first will change developer profiles
Is web development the career of the future? Yes, of course, but don’t expect digital professionals to continue to have the same profile or for the back-end-front-end-design triangle to remain as we know it today.
Collaborative work tends to make the designer aware of front-end technologies, and the front-end developer is increasingly expect to have graphic sensitivity. The objective is to produce adaptive and ergonomic graphical interfaces faster and more efficiently.
This trend is all the more evident when we see, through the appearance of frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue, . That UX is implanting at the heart of front-end design while simplifying the web development phase. and security.
In the years to come, the divide between graphic design and front-end development as two distinct professions is probably doom to disappear. Many companies already favor hybrid profiles, which reconcile graphic sensitivity and technical skills, call front-end designers.
There will, of course, always be interest in specialist developer and engineer profiles. But development in all its technicality will be more easily turn towards the technological challenges of tomorrow, following the technological revolutions that we are already seeing flourishing on the market: from augment reality to the autonomous car.
The path taken by web and mobile design software and frameworks, however, . Tends to prove the importance that UX / UI will take on pure development.
