Your role in fostering a great designer and developer relationship

The most overlooked yet important relationship in the product development process.

Team collaboration is talked about a lot in the product development world but often times overlooks the important relationship specifically between design and development, a relationship so important that it can make or break the implementation and software development process.

Take a designer and a developer who are each working in a silo and you have a recipe for at best, a lengthy and painful development process, and at worst, poor user experience in the end product.

Development and design need a healthy opposition in order to amplify individual skills and responsibilities so that these two roles can work like a well-oiled machine.

Here are some things you can do to make it easier.

As a Designer

There is no such thing as a design handoff

The word “handoff” implies that you hand over the design to development and your part is done.

This happens way more often than it should and is frequently overlooked as part of the problem.

Your role as a designer is to work with the development team through implementation to ensure that the original details of your design are translated properly into the code.

Part of this can be accomplished in annotating your prototype with as much detail as possible, but even then there may still be other items that come up for discussion.

Sending a design and then getting lost is a sure way to upset your development team or cause tension later when the completed project doesn’t look like the design you created.

Use the right tools

When your design is ready to be sent to development having the right tool that both design and development can use and openly collaborate on really helps with the implementation process.