The Developer’s Guide: Better Collaboration with Designers
By: Ece Altaylar
Tags: Collaboration, Developer, Guides And Tutorials, Designer, Front End Development

With each passing day, collaboration shines out in software development. As designers and developers, we recognize that success evolves faster when we perceive and enhance each other.

Now it is time to target developers. Here is a guide to enhance the developer’s collaboration skills and strategies to get most satisfying output from collaboration with designers.

1 — Technical Compatibility: Negotiation

As developers, we all have a specified technical scope before the project starts.

For example, if you are using Bootstrap or MaterializeCSS you will have 12 columns grid layout. For SemanticUI, you need to work with 16 columns.

Responsive breakpoints, spacings, and default margins/paddings are also essential and also depend on your UI Framework. As the list goes on and on… Make sure that you are on the same page.

If the designer does not know your specifications, reworks or delays are inescapable. Be a developer or a designer, we all do have some structure ready, so it will be harder to change when the product is ready to finalize.

Schedule a meeting before everything starts. Show all you got and expect the same. As you negotiate from scratch, less change will be required later.

2 — Consistency: Ask for a Design System or Style Guide

Developers want to make everything as generic as possible, and this is a must of our job. If you are using such pre-processors as SCSS, Sass, or Less, you are already familiar with structuring your stylesheets.

When a developer starts with defined variables set, the slightly different variables for colors or spacings can be annoying as more than the designer may guess. Consistency is fundamental when developing new screens or new components in order to save time and keep your code maintained.

To deal with this matter, the best approach is to ask for a design system, at least a style guide, or a pattern library.

3 — Participate: Be a problem solver

Developers are the first users who interact with the product. We are a special bunch of people who are the creators and also live inside of it. Remarkably, every comment has value. We often have some feelings about the designs or parts of them, which may have some “bad smell”

Generally, we do not say these thoughts at loud at least someone else does. Or a common answer when you ask for an optional solution, “I am not a designer, but there must be a better way.” Let’s get over this.

UI/UX Design is not just “art”; it is also problem-solving.

There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem. — Eldridge Cleaver

4 — Take a step back if necessary: Empathy rocks.

From a developer’s sight, it is pretty easier to communicate with other developers instead of designers, testers, or analysts. Because a key to effective communication is giving and receiving feedback instantly and a neutral feeling that we are speaking the same language.

As we differ from our specializations, this may take more time. We should not take the easy way out by overprotecting our ideas without doing appropriate research or sampling our ideas to encourage designers to understand what we actually mean.

Example reaction: “Let me do some research about this. At that time, I will send you some examples of my approach.”