Interactions and collaboration between Designers and Developers
By: Yassine Zanina
Tags: Team, Interaction Design, Design

The process of creating a product of any type or nature, is very challenging, from the inception all the way to delivering it to the mass, the team in charge goes through many stages and conducting countless tests to ensure the product is flawless and user friendly, and to achieve such result, they need to follow certain steps depending on the nature of the project, but most importantly is communication and collaboration between the team members, in most cases the team itself is divided into several groups, each group is trusted with a specific task that contributes to the making of the product.

In our case we will be addressing the interactions and the main issues and problems designers and developers face, along the way into making the product, and how we can improve the workflow without compromising the integrity of the team which will affect not only the vibe and disrupt the work environment but also reflect on the product. So, it only makes sense to take under consideration the point of view of both parties, so we will address the main issues designers face when interacting with their counterparty and how we can improve it and vice versa.

And hopefully at the end we will come to a solution to make this experience a lot better and fluent and overall beneficial for the designers and developers.

Designers interaction with developers

We begin with the designers, the team responsible of taking ideas and turning them into tangible products, to do so they use an array of tools for sketching, modeling… pretty much delivering clients with a rough visualization of what their product might look like.

After coming to a common ground, the designers then hand over their concept to developers for the actual making of the product.

And these are some of the problems designers face when interacting with the team of developers.

1- Technology limits

Designers often find themselves in a dilemma where the concepts and the designs they made for a specific product might not be fully implemented due to some technology limits,

In most cases it is a matter of taking an idea and how certain components interact with each other and translating it into code, the limits here come in different factors, some of them might affect the product’s usability, after all the team’s main goal is to make user friendly products,

2- Time

Time management is an important factor int he process of making a product, usually, clients set a deadline or delivery date, and it is imperative that the team finishes the work in time, and comply with their clients agenda, and this is another issue designers face, how can they make their designs easy to understand and fast to implement and overall clear to the developers, without having the need to explain every single components or interaction which might result in the loss of a great deal of time, which in return will affect the time table set for the project.

3- Following the guidelines of the design

Designers consider their work as art, they have a keen eye for details, so they expect from developers to follow their guidelines to perfection and as we mentioned earlier, due to some limits developers proceed to making certain shortcuts in the designs to meet some time or managerial obligations and not compromise the product, this is the main reason that tension might build up between both parties, so in order to avoid such collision between them, which will only weakens the team and ultimately come with no benefits for the firm, designers need to take it upon themselves to not complicate their designs and make them simple.

Developers interactions with designers

In the second part of this article we will shift focus to developers, and list the issues they counter when interacting with designers.

Developers are the back bone of any development company, unlike designers, developers do not take notice in small details nor do they care about colors and fonts… their main goal is to deliver a usable product in due times

1- Inconsistencies in the design

When the design team finishes its job with the designs and sketches, it is time to hand it over to developers to start coding, generally the designs are like road maps, developers follow, that also helps them to get a rough idea of the stage they are in, but sometimes developers can pick up some small details of inconsistences in the designs that needs to be cleared, and that could result in huge lost in coding time.

2- Content and resources

In most cases, developers find themselves in need of some of the resources specified in the designs, such as fonts, icons, images, color schemes, and many more, but probably the most important resources is the content, the product’s content is usually given by the client, but sometimes things gets mixed up for designers so they lorem ipsum everything, the holy grail of fake content, so when developers come across such sections they will include them in the tasks, only to find out later, that what they made and invested a great deal time and effort into making it, is actually a dummy text put there just to look good and has no significant importance in the application, this is another reason which might disrupt the workflow.

3- The details

The mindset of a developer is way different from that of a designer, this difference manifests along way into making the product, because developers perspective is based on logic, while designers perspective is mostly esthetic and functionality, so developers tend to make subtle changes in the design to suit their logic not knowing that the changes he made might reflect on the product’s usability, therefore it helps tremendously if the design team includes notes and comments to explain certain details and avoid ambiguities that might confuse the developers.

conclusion

At the end, for both parties to function properly each of them needs to take responsibility and help his counterpart do his job to perfection, and the solution to the problems each of them face is simple try to be in each other’s shoes, meaning designers needs to take a shot at coding, it will help them better understand the difficulties developers face when translating their designs into a useable product not only that but it will develop him at so many levels and enrich his knowledge, the same goes for developers, they need to do a bit of design, it will open their eyes towards the meaning behind every single object and component they code, what is its purpose and why is it there and understanding the importance of each line of code they write.

Bottom line all we mentioned, the problems, the issues… they are all enough reason why designers need to code and developers need to design.