Be nice to developers, designers!
When a designer is on a digital product development project team, the developers work WITH YOU, NOT FOR YOU. (Sounds familiar if you have watched a Spiderman movie;- ) Happy works with Spiderman, not for Spiderman.)
I understand we, designers, handing off the bunch of designs to the dev team with the high expectation that the product comes back exactly we designed.
Have you had any experiences that the dev team contacted you to look at what they build while you moved on after the hand-off phase and started working on another thing? What was your first thought? You often think that this is not what I designed.
You looked at the working-progress product, created many JIRA tickets, and dumped them to the backlog hoping someone picks up soon?
Here are the problems I had the other day. The dev team has not had enough explanations, so they come back to us with what we want to happen with the UI, interactions, and experiences.
More details are given to the developers, the faster to fix the problems. When designers spend more time in thoughts, the developers time efficiency gets better. And they don’t come back to us asking questions.
A while ago, I was in a design team that we created very detailed documentation for developers. We put a lot of thought into it. It was a part of the process and presented to them and the dev team review, give technical analysis. They come back with a minimum question before the development. Then, while reviewing, designers start creating the design for more details based on the document we provided to the dev team. It sounds like a kind of Waterfall process, but for us, it worked well.
In recent years, we don’t create and spend time documenting the designs. Instead, the software does it for us, so that we need to be careful with the design accuracy.
I recently joined a project that most of the designs have finished. (Big design upfront) Then, I start getting questions about the details of UI — how it works. These questions are right before the development phase. I thought it was late to have this kind of question from the dev team.
The design team needed to consider and tackle the details of the responsive design, back button issues, how the backend returns the data to the front-end. I also realised the lack of business-related information before we designed it to cause the last-minute questions.
We should provide explanations to the devs as much as we can, and to be able to do this, get more information from the business side.
Thanks for reading.
