Why establishing a designer-developer workflow is important?

Relationships matter. To deliver top-notch creative work, designers and developers need to create a strong collaborative partnership.

While most designers and developers know success depends on a collaborative relationship, bridging the divide isn’t straightforward. Roles, responsibilities, work style, and processes can contribute to miscommunication between these two parties — but it doesn’t have to be this way. Designers and developers can foster harmonious relationships with empathy, creative technology, and a few best practices and tips.

With a spirit of collaboration and the right processes, these teams can craft projects that fuel better customer experiences and produce solid business results more than ever before.

Developing an organized workflow will help you set clear expectations for stakeholders by defining what will happen during major phases of the project. So, in other words, it’s your opportunity to show clients the hard work behind the design.

The optimal collaboration workflow

Every company and every team works a bit differently, but there are a few essential elements you’ll need to create an optimally connected workflow between design and engineering.

Your processes may be casual or codified — regardless, these workflow steps will help.

Start with priorities

It’s easy to get into misunderstand about which task is more important when there’s no context for a specific project. Starting with the big picture is always a win. What’s the ultimate goal of this landing page, user interface, or mobile app? Is it to improve the user experience, boost functionality, rebrand, or something else?

When teams gain context, they start to see beyond their respective work. Designers begin to see that it might be worth scaling back the amazing visuals to improve page load time to ultimately improve the experience for the end-user. And developers may realize that it’s worth the extra effort to create more responsive designs to accommodate different devices and clients.

Include development in the early stages and provide all the specifications

Bring your development team into the process as early as possible — don’t wait until you’ve finalized your designs to get feedback from the development team. It’s better to ask for everything upfront than ask for this, that, and more down the road. When designers approach developers, it is important to provide all the specs they will need.

This works for both parties, don’t make your colleagues dig through emails, Slack conversations, documentation, and more to find the information they need. Here comes the importance of using the right tools and using them with clear rules and instructions that work to fit all aspects of the workflow.

Use the right tools

A successful handshake between developers and designers is a fundamental key to successful, timely, and high-quality product delivery.

A successful handshake, unlike just a handoff, means a mutual process where designers and developers can be included in the development process itself. This is the holy grail for a product team’s building workflow.

Our team uses a super-powerful combination of Figma + ClickUp + Slack.

It is important to find the right fit for your needs and your team. Remember, one size does not fit all.

Meet, ideate, and improve

The workflow shouldn’t end with the project. To improve future collaborations, the processes need to be evaluated.

What we believe worse best is to set up a meeting to ask, answer and discuss the following questions as a team:
• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• How can we prevent this “hiccup” from happening in the future?
• Why did this roadblock occur? How can we avoid it?
• What are our learnings and takeaways?

The purpose of this meeting is not to point fingers. It’s to discover gaps and friction so that you can collectively plan how to patch them up and prevent future issues.

Best practices & tips

Stay Organized

One of the biggest challenges of building a cohesive workflow is staying organized. This becomes even more difficult when you’re working with a team or dealing with a large project. Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can use to stay on top of things:

• Use folders and subfolders to organize your files.
• Set up consistent file-naming conventions that work both for devs and designers.
• Create a master document that contains all project information (drafts, specs, meeting notes, etc.)
• Use a project management tool (we recommend ClickUp) to keep track of what needs to be done, progress status, reports, etc.

Set realistic deadlines

Every interested party in the team needs to know what’s going on, progress-wise. Let everyone know when tasks have been ticked off, what milestones have been reached, and if there are problems or delays.

Setting deadlines do not end with estimation, but with upfront communication and resolving problems within the team. Our goal is always to deliver a quality product and that sometimes means quality time spent evaluating and making the right decisions are made.

Help developers understand more about your components

By seeing where the component is coming from, the developer has more context. Using Figma, developers can deduce whether a component is part of the official design system or if it’s a new element created by the designer for this specific project. That helps them figure out whether it already exists in their system, or if it needs to be built from scratch. In comparing the main component to the instance, the developer can also better understand the nature of the overrides that were applied to the instance.

Clearly indicate what is ready for development

It’s good practice for designers to clearly communicate which parts of their work are ready for implementation. That way, you don’t send developers deep-sea diving into your designs to figure it out for themselves.

Moving forward collaboratively

When you invite developers into your projects earlier, you create more transparent workflows and ensure no one is left in the dark. Developers can then ask clarifying questions throughout files and flag any potential issues early instead of at the time of implementation.

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When it comes to building a successful workflow is important to remember that there is no “us” and “them” but the only important pronoun is “we.” Once teams learn to come together and collaborate effectively as one, the sky’s the limit to what they can design, prototype, and build together.

Empathy, the focus on users, and passion — are the most important values we can use to inspire and help each other understand, not only how a certain feature is supposed to work or look, but how it’s going to impact people’s lives.

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Starting a new project and need a team that has already established a functional workflow? Contact us if you a looking for a digital partner that will enable your business to flourish.🚀