You are a Frontend Developer. Your job is to implement design and requirements. But it should not be limited to that. You can bring your own expertise to the table and suggest ideas aiming to improve the user experience.
In order to do that, you need to understand the domain of the project (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.), the project itself (what it tries to accomplish, why, how), and then your end user. Try impersonating the user, forget the requirements (your users don't have any idea about them) and see if the flows your team is building are making sense, or if there are better ways to do it. Try to make their life easier and provide an enjoyable experience.
If you're thinking about something big, reach to your project manager and UI/UX designer and tell them your ideas before implementing them, to avoid any friction. If they're only small improvements (e.g. loading skeleton, empty state, etc.), go ahead and surprise them (or don't, you know your colleagues better). In any case, tell them what and, more importantly, why you want to do it, frame it through the lens of the user's pain.
Identify what's wrong and fix it. For example:
- the searchbar goes out of view when scrolling the results list? It might be a good idea to make it stick into view;
- there's a layout shift when loading data? You might want to add a loading skeleton, even if the requirements or design don't mention it;
- the users might not understand why their call to action is disabled? Add more context to improve their understanding of the flow, maybe a tooltip is enough;
- the form has errors but they're out view? Then automatically focus the first field with an error, don't just leave it like that.
Be a master of your craft and take pride in your work. If you want to become a master, act like one, but stay down to earth and don't let arrogance grow into you. Frankly, it goes beyond user experience, you could expand this to any field, be it backend, devops, etc.
Keep in mind, there's lots of people that can implement a design, and in the age of AI you're also competing with machines, but your true value lays within your expertise and knowledge portfolio, how you apply them and how proactive you are. A valuable developer is one that could be easily be labeled as a creator, not someone who just follows instructions. LLMs also follow instructions, even if they do it incorrectly, while being confident in their answers.
