Try https://www.specifyapp.com and thank me later!
Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#122I work on a small startup team of 3. What makes my team unique is that I come from a Ux background but pivoted into development about four years ago. As such much of the friction between development and design is eliminated because I speak a common language. My teammates are pure devs. The senior dev has a decent sense of design. Early on we clashed because I felt that I needed to be the final say in design. That was…
Ego can be such a hindrance for all kinds of interactions, professional or otherwise
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#123I 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 feel like the biggest problem is the lack of "tooling" (not necessarily in the strict software sense) for doing iterative designs.
In software development, we've already developed approaches on how we can iteratively deliver features (sometimes half-baked or "unfinished", but still delivering "value"), and we've developed an understanding that this is how we get to a final solution (and an understanding that we might need to cut scope, and any one of those iterations might be the final result for the time being).
Even with all the rage tools like Figma get, it still requires each designer to come up with an approach that will effectively communicate intermediate usable design steps on their own, and it feels like that's still missing with most designers.
Perhaps the agency background that a sibling comment mentions is what's part of the problem, but just like with "design systems", I am sure even better "tools" are going to come soon as this problem is better articulated and taken upon by designers working embedded into software teams.
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Design" is not what most people think -- artistic. Just wanted to call this out as ABSOLUTELY SPOT-ON! One additional concept I'd throw at developers is that design is not about making pretty pictures alone. Sure that's a part of it - nobody wants to use something that looks like ass - but in addition to that obvious requirement, you have to convey meaning without using words and do so with patterns, layout, and f…
Not to take away from your great post, but that jab at the end felt unnecessary and reductive. There are a million reasons why Windows is more popular than Linux, and while user experience is one of them in my opinion, I'd say it's not one of the most relevant. Either way, this was a very informative post. I'll be googling these terms as soon as I'm at my desk. Thank you.
I guess UX also explains why Windows is way more popular than MacOS, too. ;-)
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#125I 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…
Since I looked into 737's middle tank bug that was used in assassination attempt (Thai PM) in 2001. I couldn't believe how stupid its design is [1]. Professional design of airplane is quite overrated TBH.
[1]: There is very low heat cap on middle tank to catch fire inside and be exploded and then there is an air compressor right below it. The security practice is to fill it with nitrogen if it's empty.
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#126Resolving Conflicts Between Designers And Engineers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32160398
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
The max issues weren’t corner cutting on quality, it was corner cutting on investment in a new design and type rating and available pilots. Although it could have quality problems; stories of 787 quality problems are concerning. But quality skimping was not the cause of the 2 fatal crashes
If I remember correctly the problem was the new models were imitating (with software) the old ones to avoid having to be certified again. When it was time to fly there were slight differences and this caused the pilots to react in the wrong way for the new model's behaviour. While I understand the reasons you mention, I do not clearly follow the distinction between cutting on costs and cutting on quality. It seems li…
This is getting finnicky, but generally I would consider a quality issue to be something to do with the build (ie substandard materials, poor riveting, trash in the dead spaces in the walls - as has been alleged on the 787) as opposed to what happened, (in my view) which was cost cutting - as you point out, they basically tried to do a software emulation of the previous 737.
The issue isn't flight worthiness - the 737 MAX can be a safe plane - but they cut costs by not wanting to do a recertification or retraining. I guess that is a quality and safety issue, but not what i'd normally consider quality?
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#128It'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.
How useful is this in practice though? I'd guess that far greater than 99% of the people using (most) products do not have perfectly color calibrated monitors. If it doesn't look good on the developer's "kinda close" monitors, that seems like a decent indication that the design needs to be updated to allow for "rougher tolerances" so to speak.
> 99% of the people using (most) products do not have perfectly color calibrated monitors
I think I would disagree. And I'd disagree on the grounds that a large swath of users mostly use a tablet or smart phone. These devices do tend to have wide color gamut and pretty good color accuracy. A lot of mid-tier and gaming laptops and monitors purely focus FPS and these are the devices coders are often coding on (obviously there are exceptions, especially anyone using an Apple device, but other OEMs too like ASUS who has been putting out 100% DCI-P3, Pantone-validated OLED panels on even mid-range laptops).
Calibration, part II, is important too. Having calibrated monitors for friends that were lower-end, they remark on how big the difference is for them, meaning calibration is still valuable even if the monitor itself wasn't of good quality.
A monitor is an important part of IO and aside from aspect ratio and resolution, developers don't tend to care about the other specs of the monitors. A good calibrated monitor would be like using the same code formatter--everyone is on the same page at least about a specific category potential issues. By eliminating color as a factor, you can now focus on having different arguments.
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#129I think this is largely a personnel & hiring problem. Stop hiring people who can't work in teams. It takes more than just Developers to ship good software. Stop hiring designers who cannot design software. > do you also find that there's a lot of tension between developers and designers? To be honest, no, not really. Only ever at one job have I experienced a problem with developers and designers working together. One…
While yes non team players on the design side or dev side can be an issue, just as much it could be project / product managers.
I think the key to a well oiled machine is good direction from product, getting everyone bought in on the vision / roadmap (or at least understanding the priorities). From there working on the Information Architecture (I call it data design). Having the data design clearly defined alleviates many issues. It shows that there is clear definition and both sides can start working on their parts even though the final design blocks the final UI.
Re: Ask HN: How to get developers and UI designers to work well together
#130I 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…
> 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.
I've actually seen this happen when the development stages of either part are wildly out of sync. The design folk finish a mockup of the UI and figure out how the components should look... while the developers are struggling to get the back end up and working properly, talking with the front end etc. And so the developers can't feasibly put the design demands in place, without ignoring other important needs.
So while one part of the team is talking about how the dropdown components and multi-select components should look, the other is struggling to get all of the API endpoints up, the DB migrations done, the server/container configuration working properly, put package updates in place and fix various bugs and issues, as well as write tests.
Some companies do distribute those responsibilities amongst multiple teams, but I've definitely seen cases where there are designers whose responsibilities are way unbalanced with those of developers, who are putting out fires a lot of the time and doing other stuff, creating friction and complicating communication and collaboration between them.
In those cases, making the dev team 2-3x larger may help (or may make everything worse, it depends), yet it doesn't seem to occur to anyone working on the project.