What’s the difference between a “front end developer”, UI designer, UX designer, and what do they do?

Question

What’s the difference between a “software engineer” and “Front-end developer”. For example, if someone is designing the code for Google, who is designing the look of the app?

Like take a popular app like Outlook. I understand that software engineers design the code and stuff, but who decides how it looks, where the reading pane goes and stuff like that.

I googled “Front end developer” and was getting a lot of info about WEB developers, but that isn’t the same right? Like are the same people who design the look of how Microsoft Paint (where the paint brush goes, where the scroll wheel goes, etc), are those the same people that design the menus for a video game?

Are all those people “front end developers”? Are they “designers”?

In: Technology

Answer 1

There is a lot of overlap.

But basically, front end developer writes code and implements a UI, if there are problems with the given design (from the designer) they try to improve it or they send it back. Front end developers might design a website and its logo appearance wise, but we are almost never “perfect” at it.

In smaller teams you will usually have a front end developer that asks an outside designer for help initially (think colours, logo, layout), then continues with the design themselves as the features change, we may even scrap the whole design in favour of something more functional.

Then you have the different “kind” of designers “UI” and “UX”, you will usually never find a UX designer in a smaller project, its just not necessary.

Here’s and example (Im a front end developer, not a designer):

[Unfinished]

[http://steamattribution.com/](http://steamattribution.com/)

I got my requirements for the project and went on my merry way, taking inspiration wherever I found it.

Is it perfect in terms of UI or UX? No. Is it good enough? Yes, I dont need to spend time and money for designers to improve it marginally. Now if youre Amazon, then yeah, you will have specialists for designing and front end developers for the implementation and coding, mostly doing their work independently, you will even have marketing and behavioral experts advising the above designers in some capacity.