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

I'm a UX Engineer and although that means I deal with technical discovery, user testing and the effective implementation of design - It is true that the most challenging part of my day is facilitating communication and helping to resolve misunderstandings and challenge priorities between Design, Engineering, Research etc.

I do this in-person, and also with tools, technology, and documentation.

What I have observed..

Firstly

There is an historical divide and a sense of importance on the part of both disciplines. Each thinks they should have priority.

Secondly

In a Start-up or any company that is working like a start-up to get a product off the ground, we build for MVP and we use Generalists/T-shaped people and we work expediently with a flexible process.. ever heard of a JFDI?

When teams grow and products scale, we tend to hold onto this expedient way of working, because stakeholders do not want to give up the rush of getting what they want ASAP.

Nobody really wants to slow down in order to perform user testing, or implement a healthy process between design and engineering - we have formed bad (although appropriate once upon a time) habits and it's not expected that you will say 'no' upwards.

Thirdly

Having worked expediently, there is likely design and technical debt, this cripples the ability to form processes / better habits because there are almost always things to fix, and changing to a more considered process starts to look expensive when there are alway live bugs to fix.

Finally (Although probably not)

When a way of working needs to change, it is very, very hard to not sound critical of the work that has gone before.

No matter how I have approached it, whether I've met with groups or individuals, if I've been soft or stern.. People are sensitive and resistant to change, and if you are unlucky they will collude and actively work against the effort.

Very much similar to the problems we have in SRE/DevOps/Platform world.

This is why we put so much emphasis on trying to hire people willing to talk/collaborate.

It's by far the hardest part of the job for everybody and WFH has amplified these frictions as building trust is best done daily not in annual offsites.

I haven't seen any company do this well but I suspect one way to help is in better defining the definition of done. No local celebrations of done (I've shipped my design - blocked on dev) - but done is celebrated collectively with all parties who contributed (including dev/design/platform/even legal). Put another way, no celebrations of work done, only celebration of business value delivered.

I'm not saying every interaction has gone this way, but it's happened more than a couple times (over the course of... 15+ years).

The last interaction I had like this was a few years ago - someone had done lots of mockups in... figma (but it wasn't figma - I can't remember the tool, but it was relatively well-known). I had 100+ "screens" with example text/input/labels on every screen.

These were done by an agency, then handed off, and... there were multiple people who had worked on it. Screens/slides 1-40 had some font label in 12px, slides 41-95 were at 13px, and the rest were at 14px.

I pointed this out, and kept getting told "stop deviating - we've already approved these - we've spent weeks going over all of these - stop thinking you know better than an award-winning design agency!"

Making screen 41 and 40 look the same was "deviating" because someone reviewing "41" against the mockup was 'wrong'. So... I made each screen with same fonts as the mockups.

Two weeks later, in some review, someone 'complained' because jumping through all the screens, the font sizes kept changing. I pointed out this was exactly the same behaviour as jumping through all the mockups, sequentially. It was obvious, but ... it was only getting reviewed holistically weeks after everything was 'approved'.

Probably the worse 'designer-led' experience I've had, but a couple others have come close (just not as stretched out). But it reinforced that the 'design' portion really needs to be involved and iterative (and... they need to be open to feedback just as much as I have to be).

>Nonetheless, every company seems to have become obsessed with it.

You don't have to know much to have an opinion about it, therefore everybody does, and it's the most important thing in the world to them.

"Normalizing the database? Wha? I'm not technical, guys, I'm more customer focused. We really need that sidebar to scroll with the page, let's work on that."

Thanks for these insights. I think this is a great approach. The question is, how to best facilitate these short/demo reviews without creating too many context-switches and interruptions for everyone. We're actually working on a platform that tries to solve this (https://livecycle.io/) by generating instant, collaborative PR preview environments. So the kinds of reviews you describe can happen async and in context. Do you think this approach would work to facilitate the reviews you outline here?