Collaboration turns ideas into products people love.

Designers and developers should sync together.

Everyone has different behaviors, we like to work how we want and sometimes we expect others to work following our ways.

I am writing this article to share my experience of providing support to developers with the 2 big scale projects I worked in the last 10 months. I learned some good things.

Designers and Developers are two main pillars for any product and the product’s quality relies on them.

Most of us (designers & developers) hesitate to share ideas with each other may be because it exceeds the bar of challenges and compromises or maybe they take it as some sort of personal competition. Some companies even invest to improve this collaboration but at the end it’s individual’s responsibility to understand this fact that there is no competition among them “THEY ARE ONE TEAM” their users will never know who worked on the design and code, all they would know about the company/team name (or maybe not even that) users are interested in good products, not in the teams. haha!

Design and Code both are separate from each other, the whole mindset is different. In a process to build a product, the efforts of other team members stay hidden while designers and developers shape up the whole team’s vision by transforming the idea into Design and then Code, to keep this transformation smooth it’s important for designers and developers to work as ONE, they should sync their mindsets. Sometimes compromises are for good and understanding each other is the best choice :)

Role of the Designer:

Many designers and other people think the designer’s role is limited to sketch files. It’s not like that anymore.

Designer’s role cannot be complete until she/he delivers 100% experience to it’s users. It’s very important for any designer to stay (to keep the designer) in the loop with the whole process until the product’s launch.

Responsibility on the Designer & Developers:

Handover is the first step of the transition from design to code and it can solve many problems, it all depends on how you do it. Designers expect from others to understand the designs by just seeing it (actually they don’t expect this from people, they expect this from their own designs).

DEAR DESIGNERS, It doesn’t work like this, your designs will be new for many people. Nothing is wrong in it. We should improve on how we handover our designs to developers and other team members. What if we take the fellow developers in a room to explain the user flows, file structures, assets availability and give them space to question on designs. Developers have the complete right to question.

A little example of how I tried to make it easy for developers to understand what sizes of the images we’ll be using in the whole project. One table chart explains all the pages. But again don’t close your self for questions. My style guide was helpful but still, I had to answer a few questions. You never know other’s perspective.

Good implementation is dependent on the handover, answering questions, giving good support to developers, understanding developer’s point of view and giving them ownership of what they are doing can really improve the quality of your product.

Designer’s expectation from developers:

Expectations! haha, I think this is from where the problem starts because everyone has set their own expectation level. Designers should not expect, in fact, they should be ready to help and waiting for the questions to improve the designs with developers.

Instead of expectations, we should build standards (on mutual understanding) for deliveries on how the projects should be a move among both teams (design and development) in order to improve the final product. It’s all about improving collaboration!

Here’s what developers want designers to know about developer handoff

Collaboration importance for product and team:

What I have experienced, collaboration breaks hesitation among people. 10 months back I didn’t know anyone from our 2nd office, today I have good friends there and I am not hesitant to share and ask them anything.

I would recommend, do not set assumptions about people without knowing them. We as designers and developers have set our minds on some pre-default actions. Try to talk in a proper way, chose your words carefully before you ask for a favor or you try to convince each other. Do not impose your wants to each other try to settle down in between. Wrong words increase the gap in collaboration and create miss-understandings.

Designers + Developers are actually Design Developers. Think about it!

Conclusion:

Be friends with everyone. Don’t hesitate on sharing ideas. Don’t mind other’s opinions. Don’t mind if someone corrects you. Don’t mind if you have to answer a question to some unrelated person (You’ll be really appreciated for this btw). Don’t set expectations. Just try to be helpful to each other. You will see a great change in yourself and in the products you work on.