What Comes First, User Experience or Software Architecture?

Key Takeaways

what's up y'all this is Hossein Nasr from I geometry podcast welcome to the third episode of our podcast here guys help you relax enjoy the show today I want to talk about user experience that's actually a very very cool topic and it's user experiences is what the users see and experience really right and when you build an application when when you own a user interacts with a certain webpage or a mobile app or or a desktop app really and and and and what how it looks like what buttons do we have you know how many clicks should the user do clicks on when using a mouse right but how many touches when you were using your phone and to achieve a certain functionality or a certain task how many how many clicks does he have how many pages had should you he/she go through in order to do a certain task right so so that is what is a user what a user experience and it's more than that but what I wanted to talk about is when we as developers right as engineers as software engineers do you do you design the soft the user experience first and that leads you to the rest of the whole stack or you designed the entire you architect the entire stack then you designed the user experience that actually it could be a controversial topic really their weekend we're gonna discuss like maybe disadvantage and disadvantages for each right eye like we're gonna make this spot that's real sure so so as a user experience Oh what we're doing my stack yeah I know I'm gonna couple that into another series of log maybe not necessarily a podcast but what we have is like you design a certain app right you I want this small application I want to design a wax app for example or Instagram right so this is how it looks like Instagram you open it you see your feed and you go through your feet of pictures and you click on a picture right if you if you clicked long enough it will expand and it's as you zoom in you can you can zoom in pinch and do more cool stuff you can comment you can like right and now what happens and you have this input right now what do you need to design an attack and there's a lot of work right for example take the feed for example right so if I open the Instagram I'm supposed to show the feed how many pictures should I show should I show all of them should I make the request to pull all these pictures for this feed that could be expensive right because what if he has like a thousand pictures we don't do that so we page them right so like for example I want to show me the first end right and I if you zoom in and if you remember they're all days you have to click like a button ok show me more now it's this more than a sec as you scroll we make this and we send another request to pull the next 10 pictures or so and it's just really quick like if you as you knows that a this guy is required more and more or no more pictures and so on so yeah so the user experience kind of derives the what are what is the back end and we're gonna talk more and more about this right after this all right so we just designed our interface the user interface and we let's continue taking Instagram as an example so now what we want to do is now that I designed this should I make the back end as a service oriented or should I make it as a cue database obviously the moment we decide that oh it's a mobile app you can make it just as a data base or I do have to have it at the service now you have to think about the back end not only the service what is the service hitting is it hitting a relational database or is it hitting distributed no sequel database now this answer is what kind of questions this kind of answer right is do you really care if a user opens do you really care about acident attributes and I made a lot of videos on my youtube channel you guys can check it out on asset database asset in general so like this attribute which is atomicity consistency isolation and durability so do these attributes matter for you for your app that you desire is it if I make a like do does this like have to hundred percent persist otherwise we all die right or not so enough for if you're building a financial institution app then yes obviously right so but that's where you need relational databases right no I'm not saying that no sequel databases are is creepy they are not beautiful or anything but they have the concept of eventual consistency but if you want immediate results you might want to get a relation database right but otherwise I take this example now I have this app and who are my users are they in the United States are they the entire world now we have to worry about okay if this apps gonna scale I probably want a database that people can upload gotta upload thousands of thousands of pictures a wall a relational database do that you know that right relation database does not scale well because they are designed to run on one box so your box better have one location right so it's either in the east or west or and all these services hitting that box right there are obviously ways to scale my database I mean this this talk has we has went through the wrong direction but but he has just we're talking about the user experience and how how can we as a user experience kind of drive the back end design like you ask you all these questions because you have a user experience to begin with you have an an initial user experience you have something and then you start the design the other way right so you start the backend design your services your databases your network your is really become the full stack engineer Nana Raya I'm gonna I'm gonna make a video another video vlog what just maybe a lot about full-stack engineering but yeah so we have another 1 minute I wanted to discuss about yeah this is one way to do it other way is and design your system architect your system hey I'm gonna use I'm gonna building an Instagram app but I want to use this and this and this on December and then you derive if a user at experience of whatever api's you provide so you build the api's first and then you start building the user experience most of the time you're gonna end up with a crappy user experience in Maya because like if I've got a designer I am an engineer right we have if I am an engineer I gonna design an app that gets photos I'm gonna say like get photos a good picture and that's it then and that gets all the photos right and back in the user experience user experience I'm gonna like the open the app and then call that get picture and then you and I end up with a whole list of everything then you start needing more information more and more so you have to agree agreement these api's accordingly guys alright so guys bottom to top or top to bottom in your opinion guys what do you prefer design the user experience first and that leads to the whole stack or design the stack and then worry about the user experience later I'm sure there are most must be sorry excuse me there must be advantages and less advantage for both because while designing the stack you kinda if you begin designing the stack you will optimize for the stack right but if you design they use but but you gonna end up with a poor user experience but if you end up starting with the user experience and then design a stack then you were ganna prioritize what the user needs but then you might end up with a lot of other performance problems so I'm not saying one is better than the other but what do you think hit me up in the comment section here with an anchor FM or over there and YouTube if I have loaded that to you so yeah let me know Twitter Facebook yeah what do you prefer what do you think what is your take on that and I'm gonna see in the next podcast you guys take care good bye