The value of collaborating with developers EARLY
In an ideal situation, you’re communicating with developers early on in the design process, as you’re brainstorming ideas. If you were to involve the developers too late in the process, the design would come as a surprise, and you’ll miss out on their valuable input. Developers have a deep knowledge of the codebase and are excellent at
- architecting processes
- finding edge cases
- identifying faults in a system
- understanding constraints
- estimating the technical lift involved with a given solution
Here are some ways to promote transparency when collaborating with developers.
How do they prefer to communicate with you?
- Get a sense for the optimal timing: Some people prefer to give feedback right away after you share a design with them, and others like to digest it and share feedback later.
- Would they like to routinely meet at a certain time or day of the week to sync up on any questions? Or chat randomly, as needed?
Find out if they prefer communicating in:
- Direct messages
- Zoom meeting
- Slack channel
- Jira ticket comments
- Comments in the design file
- Emails
- etc.
Do they feel comfortable using the design tool to view designs?
A typical modern design workflow is to share the design file directly with developers. Tools like Adobe XD and Figma have made this feasible. Offer to give developers a walkthrough of your tool if they are unfamiliar with it. You can even create a simple FAQ doc to highlight the main functionality; this is especially beneficial for sharing knowledge across a large development team.
Include them in the design process
Get feedback
- Invite developers to provide feedback, concerns, and suggestions.
- What am I missing?
- Is this consistent with our project goals?
- Is there a misconception about the technical capabilities of the system?
- Is there a solution that looks promising?
- Can you think of any better ideas?
- What are the most difficult features to build?
- Is there an easier solution?
Whiteboard together
- You can do this in person or with design tools like Adobe XD and Figma, which have a co-editing feature.
- Another remote-friendly tool is Miro, which is growing in popularity due to its whiteboard feature
- Iterate on designs with their feedback in mind. The more you do this, the more it builds trust. It shows you respect their opinions and expertise.
Understand their process and preferences
- What is their process? Is there a way you can adapt?
- Is there a file naming convention they prefer for assets? Do they want them exported out to a certain shared folder?
Efficiency wins
Involving developers early on leads to better solutions that can usually be implemented faster. Plus, once a concept is finalized, developers can get started on any preparatory work, such as setting up databases while the designer puts finishing touches on the visual design.
Up next
Next, we’ll take a look at collaboration during the development phase. We’ll prepare design files to share with developers.