Casting Graphite in Gold: The Cliff Notes
Improving the relationship between design and development
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read
I just read this great article by Daniel Eden about improving the relationship between design and development. I have experienced my own struggles with this and I know that others on my team have as well. I don’t have all the answers but I think that an open conversation about this is a great place to start.
Please read the article. But if you don’t, here are the highlights.
- Designers need to ask for inclusion in technical processes, and engineers need to invite designers into their workflow. Designers don’t have to learn how to code, but learning the vocabulary of an engineer can foster a great deal of mutual respect and more well-reasoned design choices.
- Design and engineering should be working in parallel, not in sequence, to one another. Challenging and supporting each other until and after the product is complete and aligned with everyone’s vision of completion. The idea of “design lock” is a futile endeavor. Engineering and implementation are a vital part of the design process, and should never be considered a separate step. The relationship between design and engineering should be cyclical and additive.
- Designers and engineers should learn to lean on a design system to dictate the discerning details of the completed product. A failure to ship a product “to spec” is usually indicative of a larger issue — a lack of common vocabulary required to ensure engineers, designers, product managers, and entire product teams can communicate clearly and unambiguously their vision for a product.
- Invite engineers to collaborate in the design process early and often both helps ground a designer’s choices in logic and the constraints of the available resources, and builds trust between the two parties, ensuring a similarly collaborative workflow when it comes to implementation
The goal is that with better communication and collaboration we can make better products and be more efficient doing so. As a designer, I see these problems from that perspective. I would love to hear developers share your perspective as well.
