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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

#31

Post by Brajeshwar »

I'm usually the guy called in to make peace between designers and developers. I have consulted with large enterprises, major IT providers, etc., and my job was to bridge the gap. I have also been one of the Creative Directors at Razorfish, but my job usually starts with presales and meddles with the product managers, designers, and developers.

In short, I can talk the business talks while designing and finish off coding the designs. So, here are what I think.

The war between Designers and Developers will never end, and it is OK. The designers will blame the developers that they are supposed to be smart enough to code the design. At the same time, the developers will scorn that the designers have no clue how things work. The situation aggravates in bigger companies and environments where separate teams by function, not by products or features/modules.

There was a documentary about Aston Martin making the One 77[1]. The engineers, designers, and everyone work together. There are no separate teams that come together later to fit in the final car. A few friends and I used to refer to this analogy when explaining how to get designers and developers to work together -- think of the product/feature/module and then bring the team together from the start.

There should be one person in the team who can walk between the designer and developer world, even if s/he can only either design or write code. S/he should have that empathy to understand both sides of the stories. Once you have that person and the team begin to learn to dance around, the intricacies of interaction between the two different minds will be the time when things get smoother. There will still be friction, but it should become way more manageable.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2289553/

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

#32

Post by hhhsss »

barbarbar wrote: post #27
32MHz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It means that they don’t work at FAANG.

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

#33

Post by onion2k »

If 'design' and 'development' are entirely separate it's pretty much impossible because the two sides have different goals. You have to align them. This entire process gets a lot easier when you have one team who understand that their job is to deliver value to the customer (or user) rather than "design pretty things" or "write clever code".

Until everyone gets that message, it can't work.

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

#34

Post by 542458 »

recroad wrote: post #25

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. ht…

I agree with this. I always tell people that the designs aren’t carved in stone or written in blood, and if something looks or feels wrong to bring it up. There’s no point in the process where the design can’t be improved, and anybody can be the one who finds an opportunity for improvement. And there’s also no shame in changing a design to make it easier to code. Ultimately no design is ever finished, and anything can be adapted or improved.

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

#35

Post by Erik-Kjell »

Align the teams on things they both value: system thinking.

The best way I've found to get designers and developers to produce 1+1=3 outcomes is to show developers the design system (styleguide) and show designers a development process (functionality > fixes > finesse) that works.

Inertia slows team progress when designers hand off fully-finessed, high-fidelity screens that would take considerable time to implement.

Instead, ask your design team to start with functional lo-fi designs so engineers can have a basic UX/UI to dev against. The audience for the lo-fi is mainly internal, think pre-release/private alpha.

Some of the early development work is around feasibility, which doesn't require all the finesse designers value.

After you have functional lo-fi's, the design team can ship mid-fi screens that have fonts, colors, etc. Hold off on gradients, shadows, and micro-interactions. Lottie animations can come later.

At this point, you can start user-testing features and validating each hypothesis. It's much easier to iterate development on mid-fi's vs. hi-fi's. Especially when you need to make changes. Making changes at the mid-fi stage de-risks your startup.

Now you've done design and development in tandem and you don't need long design cycles that take forever to implement and de-motivate developers.

Nothing will motivate developers to implement your polished hi-fi screens more than having a validated product.

Hope this helps! @erikkjell

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

#38

Post by doix »

I'm going to shill a little bit, at Kitemaker[0], we use Kitemaker to solve this problem ;).

The typical workflow is that someone creates a work item to track some improvement or new feature. There, the idea is explored before any design or code work is done so that everyone involved understands what the goal is.

Then our designer will go and create some mockups and in figma (and link the figma in the work item). We'll then have discussions about the design, one nice thing is that the figma comments appear in the activity panel of the work item in kitemaker. So even if designer asks a question in figma, the rest of the team can see that in kitemaker (since programmers rarely live inside figma).

Once we've addressed as much as we can at the pure design stage, we'll start implementing the feature in code in a branch (that's linked to the work item). If anything comes up in development that we didn't foresee, we'll discuss it in kitemaker/figma/slack (if it's slack, we make sure to mention the work item so that it's picked up by the integration and shows up in the kitemaker activity feed).

As soon as something is even remotely "working", we create a w.i.p PR which spins up a test environment in Cohesive[1] (no affiliation, just a customer) and link to it in the work item. This lets the designer play around with the feature as it's developed and start giving feedback or adjusting the designs as early as possible.

The key is really just communication as early as possible and throughout the entire process. To make this more tool agnostic:

1) Make sure everyone understands what problem they are trying to solve for the user.

2) Get designers to share the designs as early as possible so that engineers (and others) can provide feedback.

3) Have a way for engineers to share the w.i.p in a test environment as early as possible so that designers can adjust designs or give feedback to developers.

4) Have a way to keep references to all the discussions in one place and visible to the entire team.

[0] https://kitemaker.co/

[1] https://www.cohesive.so/

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

#39

Post by willhinsa »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #31

I'm usually the guy called in to make peace between designers and developers. I have consulted with large enterprises, major IT providers, etc., and my job was to bridge the gap. I have also been one of the Creative Directors at Razorfish, but my job usually starts with presales and meddles with the product managers, designers, and developers. In short, I can talk the business talks while designing and finish off cod…

The role you described as a bridge between those two domains, how could I go about pursuing that as my career?

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

#40

Post by toastal »

It's only one tip, but if both developers and designers are in color-calibrated environments with color-accurate monitors, you can eliminate some it-looks-good-on-my-screen arguments with technology (colorimeters). Many developers that are working pretty close with designers are using really bad, not-calibrated panels and aren't seeing the same thing as the person giving them the design.
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