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Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

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Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#21

Post by onei »

diogenes_of_ak wrote: post #18

I come from a different industry before moving into this one, but there’s a chaotic and abysmal lack of teamwork between departments in this industry that I’ve seen this far. Have those two teams work together. Also, foster a culture of continuous self-improvement. I’ve now seen a bunch of “it’s good enough to ship, go for it” and now whatever work arounds and bandaids are permanent. Don’t be so fast, don’t try to it…

I agree with your overall point, but I think your example might be a bit off.

Boeing also cut corners on quality, hence the issues with the 737 MAX. It's obviously not a direct comparison, but skimping on certain things to get something to market faster is not a uniquely SaaS technique.

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#22

Post by samsolomon »

"It is critical for a designer to go all the way through the process. Even if they aren’t actually the ones shipping production code—that knowledge about how things work tightens the relationship between them and those they work with. Designers knowing how to code and talk to users cuts down on wasted communication. It creates a tighter connection with other teammates and ensures that design is part of the process from start to finish."

That quote is from an interview I did years ago when Cap Watkins left Etsy to become Buzzfeed's VP of Design. It has stuck with me ever since.

He's speaking about designers, specifically. But I think it's important for all parties to understand as much of the process as possible. The better the understanding, the tighter the feedback loop.

The interview for anyone interested.

https://solomon.io/portfolio/cap-watkins/

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#23

Post by wizofaus »

butz wrote: post #2

Have you read this article https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/07/resolving-conflicts... ?

"[D]esigners should have opinions on the applied technical solution"

He must work with very different designers than the ones I have, whose eyes just glaze over when you try to explain even in relative layman's terms how it works under the hood and why there are particular challenges implementing exactly what's been asked for. I can't readily imagine the quality of my code ever being improved by the opinion of someone who's never written a line of code in their life. Just as it would make little sense for me to have opinions on how to achieve particular shading effects or to improve the readability of a font or the optimum amount of negative space needed for all possible device dimensions in order to provide a rewarding experience for various categories of end-users.

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#24

Post by haydenchambers »

diogenes_of_ak wrote: post #18

I come from a different industry before moving into this one, but there’s a chaotic and abysmal lack of teamwork between departments in this industry that I’ve seen this far. Have those two teams work together. Also, foster a culture of continuous self-improvement. I’ve now seen a bunch of “it’s good enough to ship, go for it” and now whatever work arounds and bandaids are permanent. Don’t be so fast, don’t try to it…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#25

Post by recroad »

I have a fair bit of experience here as I work with many teams struggling with this.

The root cause I have found is getting designs done in isolation and then treating the Figma/Sketch/whatever file as a hard business requirement, instead of treating the user experience as a collaborative exercise that is a tradeoff between usability and feasibility.

Sorry for blogspam but I sketched a model of the two approaches. https://bitbytebit.substack.com/p/waterfall-design?sd=pf

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#27

Post by barbarbar »

32MHz wrote: post #6
zevir wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How big is your company? Are you in person or remote? I wonder if it depends on the setup and profile of the company...

I’m at a FAANG+, in a team working on B2B enterprise products (SAAS). Previously I was in consumer electronics and B2C, but even then there was a healthy relationship between design and eng. I’ve been remote for about 5 years. What are specific examples of friction you’re encountering ?

What is FAANG+ I know the acronym but not the plus? Is it some kind of formula one league within FAANG?

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#28

Post by quadcore »

From my experience. If you are a junior developer, you are screwed. If you are senior you have leverage.

Designers don't understand the hardship of developers at first, they think they can do whatever they want to you. You gota teach them. Threaten to leave on a conflict. Make them understand those roller coasters are hard on you. Teach them easy rules like: a dev gota finish what he started, some things are virtually impossible to do (spaghetto code is real), you can't get pressured to deliver every day, etc.

If you are thinking about work outside working hours for a long period of time, people are probably hard on you. On average a designer don't think much about work outside of work pretty sure about that. They drink, they fool around town and they get laid. As a developer you deserve that as well.

Once that's understood, from my experience you should have fun together.

Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together

#29

Post by dmalik »

Agree with a lot of comments here about more/better communication.

Depending on the size of company you're in there is a specialized role that bridges the gap. At Google it's called a UX engineer, other companies call the roll Design Technologist (DT).

DTs have a technical understanding of what's possible but work in UX and typically produce prototypes to assess technical feasibility of solutions. You can use these prototypes for stakeholder reviews, usability testing and they really derisk the build process.

We had a really bad time of changing things in production multiple times which would take forever before we started prototyping and practicing iterative design and design thinking.

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