Designers and Developers Collaboration: 10 Steps to Start Working Together
Many modern work cultures separate design and development teams into independent units. During my time working as a designer at a large company, I experienced this first-hand, with these teams acting as separate units on the same project.
One of the issues was that there was little communication between us: once designs were completed, we digitally passed them to our development team to build without any additional communication. Another issue was that there were no daily discussions, brainstorming across departments, or exchanging of ideas to accompany the handoff.
As a direct result of this, I observed five main problems that developed as a result:
- Unnecessary back and forth between design and development departments. Because there was little communication about the designs, we spent a considerable amount of time explaining concepts and clarifying decisions for our development team.
- Creativity was suppressed. We knew so little about each other’s domains, meaning there were limited opportunities for building new, creative products or features.
- Long, complicated QA processes. Specifications were unclear, so QA testing designs took additional time from every member of the team.
- Duplication of efforts. Even though there were overlapping skills among team members on distinct teams, we couldn’t leverage each other’s skills.
- An inability to take advantage of new tools for collaboration. Both our teams used antiquated processes and tools, but since we weren’t regularly communicating, we weren’t identifying opportunities for improvement.
It’s not uncommon for design and development teams to be disconnected, even though these roles are integrated into building a single product. I often found myself thinking there must be a better way. I wondered if it was possible to improve collaboration between these teams, increasing value to the client or end user?
Fortunately, there is, and I was lucky enough to experience it in subsequent professional roles. In this article, I’ll explore how understanding each other’s common processes, workflows, and leveraging design collaboration tools can bridge communication gaps and help designers and developers work together.
Table Of Contents
Where Design Meets Development
In theory, the product development process itself is actually pretty straightforward. But it often falls apart in the final two steps: Visual Design and Development. Tellingly, it’s at these stages where design meets development.
