Excellent article: Where are the mocks?

Developer: “Where are the mocks? I can’t start my work until I have them.”

Designer: “I can’t handover the mocks until they’re finished.”

I think that the solution is to:

1. Stop thinking about “the mocks” or “the designs” as one big asset.
2. Divide it up into stages. Usually this means: define the high level input/output of each scene, then rough wireframes, then layout, then UI interaction, then visual designs. The developer should be able to start building with the first stages and iterate when the next stages are ready.
3. Ideally, structure the project so that the designer can inject/replace design assets directly, when created or updated, such as colour, font, icons.

The team needs to define tickets based on this staged process, and figure out how that might work with Agile’s “thin vertical slice” goal.

Or, better yet, dispense with mocks altogether and find a way to create assets that the developer can use directly, rather than re-create and have to throw all of you hard work away. Build the product, instead of mocks!