5 Most Common Designer-Developer Handoff Mishaps

Learn what to look for and prevent making the same mistakes.

Despite sharing the same end-goal, the designer-developer handoff is full of mistakes waiting to happen, causing a lot of wasted time, money, and sanity for teams. Instead of all that, read about the five most common mistakes teams make here so you can avoid them altogether.

The word hand-off implies a one-time linear event, where the designer works independently from Monday-Tuesday and hands off their results to the developer who works Wednesday-Friday, and there’s never any real collaboration. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Making good products is a collaborative endeavor, and both parties should be involved throughout the entire process.

Mistake #1: Hand-off and Done

Adopting this collaborative mindset from the very beginning prevents a lot of pain later on. Even a 20-minute conversation early on can allow developers to share relevant technical constraints or designers to advocate for larger technical changes ahead of time.

When designers have finished the bulk of their design, schedule a walkthrough session so developers can clarify the flow, understand any nuances of the design, and ask questions. This is also a great time for the designer to highlight any specific assets, states, or microinteractions to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks.

As is common practice in established organizations, when developers have pushed their code to staging or any internal platform, they should invite the designers to review the product for inconsistencies or missing components. Seeing a design come to life can reveal opportunities for improvement.

Designer and developer collaboration cannot happen at just one point of hand-off. It should happen across dedicated meeting points in the feature lifecycle (and probably through some Slack messages too).

There are also plenty of tools that assist with handoffs or remove the need for them entirely.

But is communicating early and often enough? Nope. You must also make sure you’re communicating correctly.

Mistake #2: Miscommunication

The worst time to discover a mistake is when development is nearly finished. When developers build something different than the designers intended, countless hours of work are wasted. While frequent collaboration can mitigate miscommunication, breakdowns still occur and the penalties can be harsh.

The most important part of communication with regards to product development is to leave no question unanswered. By scheduling dedicated walkthroughs and reviews, your team will have a clear opportunity to ask specific questions. Encourage developers to reach out to designers if they run into any issues — designers would much rather answer a few questions now than review an incorrectly built feature later.

Your team will be able to ask better questions if they are familiar with the entire product development life cycle. Make an effort to help your design team understand the big picture of relevant technical processes and constraints. Walk developers through your product design system and branding. Both designers and developers should get in the habit of explaining their decisions, at least at a high level. The more your team can speak each other’s language, the more comfortable they will be communicating.

Finally, clear documentation between designers and developers can support face-to-face conversations and provide a good reference when working. Design teams should clearly and uniquely name components, screens, and flows. Instead of just sending mockups or prototypes to the developers, designers should provide relevant notes, alternate states, and logic flows with relevant screens or prototypes.

Mistake #3: Inconsistency

We’ve all used outdated websites that resemble Frankenstein’s monster, and none of us want to make products that fall into that bucket. Humans look for familiar patterns to make sense of the world around them, and they learn to use digital projects in the same way. Inconsistency looks bad in a finished product and can also leave developers confused as they programmatically build tools to a designer’s specification.

The best way to avoid inconsistency in designs and/or development is to maintain a design system. As Audrey Hacq defines it, “a Design System is the single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow the teams to design, realize and develop a product.” Through the intentional and consistent use of branding, components, and patterns, designers and developers can stay on the same page at all times.

Incorporate your design system into as many of your tools as possible, whether that’s building components in Sketch, Figma, or maintaining a style library in your codebase. The consistency provided by a design system enables your team to work more efficiently and creates a more holistic and intuitive product for your users.

Mistake #4: Missing Screens or Logic Breakdowns

Developers often lament, “Well there wasn’t a design for that, so I had to wing it.” From the designer’s standpoint, it can be very easy to forget about one screen in a flow or state for a button when they’re worrying about dozens of screens for a single feature.

Some engineers might be comfortable extrapolating a set of styles across a feature or product, but not all of them will be. Even if they are willing to wing it, they likely don’t have the same training and user research to work from as their design team.

As a designer, one of the best ways to catch all these edge cases is to build interactive prototypes for testing and to make sure you’ve accounted for any scenario. Even with some quick internal testing, you’ll uncover points where your design falls short. This practice can also help you catch any tertiary flows you might have missed like logging in or empty states.

In place of mocking up every screen, clear documentation can explain what needs to change in different instances. For example, when designing a form that updates based on user input, you can save time by mapping out the logic and corresponding text and inputs, rather than make mockups of every possible flow. In general, clearly documenting all possible states of a screen can assure the developer that they or the designer haven’t forgotten anything.

While designer-developer collaboration should continue on after the design portion is complete, any material that’s meant to guide the development should be 100% accurate. It’s worthwhile for the designer to spend 10 minutes reviewing all of the designs to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.

Mistake #5: Too Many Tools

With dozens of tools for UI design, prototyping, sharing, and fetching design specs, designers and developers often have more points of collaboration than they can count. Each new version and tool creates another opportunity for miscommunication or mistakes to creep in.

Perhaps the designer makes wireframes in Sketch, shares them via Abstract, and prototypes in InVision and Protopie. Preserving consistency across so many platforms is exhausting and creates a lot of unnecessary mental burden for both designers and developers. Where should the developer go to get the latest version? What if the designer forgot to upload their latest changes to Abstract?

The best way to answer those questions is to use as few tools as possible. We’re answering the issue by releasing a fully code-backed design system manager to eliminate the concept of handoff completely. With only one place for designers and developers to reference, they can spend their energy and time on building great products, not double- and triple-checking specs.

By tackling these 5 common mistakes, designers and developers can balance their perspectives and priorities to build better products more efficiently and peacefully.