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

Unfortunately, this is ultimately a talent/hiring issue, as it's easier to hire developers who have zero design experience and vice versa. When you treat people like interchangeable cogs, you don't get good collaboration.

they don't seem to care that i have more pressing concerns than whether something they've been staring at for 6 hours is 1 pixel off.

One way to push back, if you use anything like story points for estimation and scoping, is to point low-design and high-design options separately, for any elements where design choices may have a major effect on that. "This is a 5-point feature with a basic button with the correct brand colors and a spinner for busy state—but a 13-point feature with what's presented in the designs, including a bouncing hover animation and the button morphing into the company logo as its busy-state et c."

Part of the problem is the cost of design on the development process, not just making initial mockups, is often ignored or not correctly accounted for. If you make it explicit, lots of times it turns out a simpler version (which is going to be better for users anyway, 90% of the time—but being good for the users isn't the reason for a lot of UI design, see: constant user-hostile but flashy redesigns across the industry) is in fact acceptable if it means you can fit another feature or two in a given sprint. "We can come back and do the fancier styling & behavior later when we have less feature development to do" but then, as with most things that get deferred, you never will, which is for the best.

TLDR: No shock here, if you think about it long enough, but the answer I found was empathy. This professional relationship between designer and engineer (which I've found through many interviews—formal and informal—to be the same for architect and engineer, stage designer and carpentry shop, etc.) is still a human relationship. It's easy for a lot of people to forget that, or to think that professional relationships don't require emotional intelligence/work/etc.

Fairly early in my career as a front-end engineer I landed at a fancy advertising agency. We built high-end interactive marketing sites for big names. We had a lot of hot-shot designers who were VERY excited about themselves, and were, frankly, watching Mad Men a little too closely and drawing the wrong inspiration. It was quite easy for me to start blaming them for the parts of the design -> engineering hand-off process that weren't working. Their designs seemed to ignore the constraints of the technology, the budget, the schedule, etc. And several of them jerks who would quickly throw the engineers under the bus and say "the engineering team at the last place I worked could have done this in a week."

Then one day I started a new project with a new designer. He dropped by my desk with design specifications that contained all the info I normally had to go spelunking into design source documents to try to ascertain myself. This guy had put them all in one place for me to make it easy. I was shocked. I noticed something that wasn't technically feasible in the design right away, and thought I'd test the waters. "Could we do this differently? The technology won't allow this exactly because of [blah blah blah]." He listened. He asked if we could both think about it a little longer, him thinking of alternative designs and me seeing if there was some approach I hadn't thought of that might make it possible.

The next time I spoke with him, as he was about to walk away, I said, "Hey, quick question… how come you're not an asshole?"

I'm so glad I asked.

I've already gone on a while, so I'll try to summarize. Essentially, he told me a story from his days in art school. Final exams, which for his art program meant turning in a lot of finished graphic design projects, which meant getting a lot of digital artwork printed, which meant going to a print shop and handing over all the money left in his bank account and then just sitting there for hours waiting for the prints, realizing that he had not control over what happened at this point. Did the printer install the fonts the way he'd asked? Were the color spaces configured correctly? Did the printer know what they were doing? Were they any good? There wasn't going to be any time to re-print (let alone enough money to pay for that), so his final exam was completely in the hands of this printer.

"That's how we often feel working with engineers." He said. "We turn over to you design files that we're proud of. They're beautiful. Then we just have to wait and see, a lot of the time, what actually ends up getting shipped. Often what shows up doesn't resemble our designs. The wrong fonts, the wrong colors, padding, margins. Sometimes the layout itself isn't even close. And we're powerless to do anything about it, and if we speak up too loud we're called prima donnas."

I immediately realized how I'd been complicit in this pattern so many times. How many times had I totally missed things like padding/margins that didn't matter to me because my untrained eye couldn't even see the difference unless it was pointed out to me? How many times had I said "eh, good enough" rather than trying a little harder, or going back to the designer to see if we could find a middle-ground?

I thought of the design specs he'd dropped off and how helpful they were. I realized that the only way forward was to mimic his style: respect for each others' disciplines, empathy for the struggles that each of us had in our work, dedication to work together—to set each other up for success and put the quality of the work before our own personal convenience.

For me that approach got me jobs I thought I would never qualify for. I got so good working with designers I became one. I've worked as a front-end engineer, a design technologist (hybrid designer-developer), and even as a straight up lead designer (UX/interaction design) for the past 15 years. My career has been rewarding (getting to go to/speak at conferences around the world, getting to co-author an O'Reilly book, etc.) beyond any dreams I had early on, and I think I owe so much of it to that designer and his lesson in empathy.

This is a side-note that might be as important (or more so) than the main thread. Why was I able to empathize with him so quickly, instead of getting defensive, as was my wont at the time (and still is more often than I'd like)? I think the key was the STORY he told. It's so easy for us to drop ourselves into a story as the main character. When he told that story, I was the art student frustrated with the printer. When the tables turned and I realized I was actually the printer in this story, it was a powerful moment because I had put myself in the designer's place. My defensive instincts were coming out in defense of the main character of the story (me as the designer).