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Ending design handoff: this is our fight

If we, as designers, don’t fight to end the design handoff sh** show, then who will?

Shamsi Brinn
UX Collective
5 min readFeb 27, 2023

Project handoff is one of the most inefficient and painful steps in software development.

Designers and developers both hate it. Handoff leads to a false antagonism between design and development teams. Designers fight to “be in the room”, but design handoff is a door we can’t walk through. While for developers, front-loading design means they are always building solutions they had no say in and are left holding the product hot potato.

Furthermore, unnecessary rework of both design and code is nearly guaranteed, and the monetary costs are high. The Dev Ops Research & Assessment Group calculates that for a medium-sized business at a medium level of technical performance, upwards of 37.8M is lost to unnecessary rework each year.

A table showing the lost savings from unnecessesary rework, for companies from small to large, and from low to high levels of IT performance.

Forrester Research quantified how much cheaper it is to find and fix problems earlier in the build process, with costs 30 times higher if fixes happen after work ships.

“Costs are 30 times higher when rework happens after work ships.” —Forrester Research

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Shamsi Brinn

Building products and teams around intensely productive collaboration.

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