Professional Work Ethics between Designers and Developers.
An AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Celestine Omin on Best practices and tips on professional ethics and soft skills in relation to designer/developer collaboration.
Celestine Omin — Hello everyone! To get things started, I will like to introduce myself. Celestine Omin is a software engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is currently an Engineering Manager at Paystack, a technology company solving payments problems for ambitious businesses in Africa. Prior to Paystack, he worked as a Senior Technical Consultant at Andela, an elite engineering organization that provides companies with access to the top 1% of tech talent across the African continent.
As Senior Technical Consultant, Celestine managed teams of Andela developers and works with Andela’s partner companies to understand their business goals and product roadmap. He provided technical guidance and oversight to ensure that engineering teams are running in accordance with world-class technical standards.
Prior to Andela, Celestine worked at Konga, the largest online e-commerce marketplace in Nigeria with well over 20,000 merchants and $78.5M in venture funding. While at Konga, Celestine served as the lead engineer for SellerHQ, helped in migrating some of the company’s monolithic applications to micro-services, and led the development of a community forum for Konga’s merchants and customers that greatly shaped the company’s product roadmap and strategy.
Outside of Andela, Celestine speaks regularly at technology conferences across Africa. He organizes and leads Africa Git Meetup, which recently featured GitLab’s Kelvin Mutuma as a guest speaker. Celestine has a bachelor in Computer Science from the University of Calabar. He blogs and shares his thoughts about startups in emerging markets, with a special focus on Nigeria and Africa on http://cyberomin.github.io
Q — Welcome Celestine really excited about having you with us. My first question is about “documentation” and what it means to developers and how can it be done without between designers and developers in a way that doesn’t cause more confusion seeing how they speak different terminologies?
Celestine Omin — First and foremost, both parties must agree on a common goal. Why are we documenting in the first place? Getting this right sets the tone for every other thing. It helps clear ambiguity and eliminate friction. The next thing is choosing a tool. The tools for documentation can either make or break the process. So, both parties must agree on a tool that works favourably for all of them. Then lastly, agreeing on terminology and common language. What language will we use for documentation? This helps eliminate unnecessary back and forth and brings about consistency. With all of this, every person that joins the team can immediately dive in and get a better sense of things. To cite an example, we use a tool called Notion. It scales well and allows for easy collaboration.
Q — Companies like Apple are constantly thinking about accessibility. They want everyone to use their devices, so as a developer how do you tell a designer to make their design more accessible? Because I believe sometimes they only see the UI, not the UX.
Celestine Omin — I think the best thing to do is ask them to work with a focus group. For instance, the way an 80-year-old would interact with a tablet is different from how a 20 or 30-year-old will. With this in mind, they will begin to see how these focus group will clear their biases and bring a few things to bare. Essentially, they should test their hypothesis with non-technical audiences.
Q — Hi Celestine, good day and nice to have you! My question is pretty simple. Who should be bothered by working directly with content people? The designer or the person implementing.
Celestine Omin — The designer. They have a better sense of typography and how to layout content in the most elegant way. See the designer in this instance like an architect. She/He crafts the vision. The person implementing just follows the designer’s vision.
Q — Some designers love the cleverness of their ideas rather than fear the consequences of their work because all they see is the aesthetic considerations, so how do you highlight such to a designer without them seeing the developer as someone who is not capable of the implementing their design.
Celestine Omin — I think one thing that no one can really question is data. I will say run a focus group, show them the results and I am certain with will allow them to take informed decisions as to just designing for aesthetics alone.
Q — The Figma Africa community is generally made up of people in different cities so remote collaboration is mostly the only option for us. However there is still a lot of friction with it, so is there a way this collaboration can be done seamlessly without friction in terms of communication and management?
Celestine Omin — Be clear with your communication, especially written communication. Add plenty of contexts. Make it verbose if need be. But by all means, don’t hold back from over communicating. Finally, do in-person talk regularly. Use video tools like zoom, Skype, etc..
Q — Good Day celestine; do you think designers should know the technical limitations of their design? some animations take a lot of time to render on the frontend and most users don’t have sufficient internet speed or powerful devices to render such content.
Celestine Omin — Yes. But it should be done in such a way that the developer doesn’t come across as being uncooperative.
Q — Should a developer be interested in design? I once worked with a developer that is not interested in design so that makes implementation and functionality horrible.
Celestine Omin — Frankly, some developers including myself can’t tell a good from a bad design. I think the designer should see it as a teaching opportunity. Also, letting people understand the consequences of their work helps a whole lot.
Q — Hey Celestine, I have a quick one? most developers just downright ask for designs without considering the time taken in the design process. Should developers participate in the UX Process and if yes, what should they contribute?
Celestine Omin — Yes they should. If anything, just allowing them to see the thought process also will bring things to perspective. Finally, designers shouldn’t get hung up on their design ideas and ignore reality. The developer should always help them do a reality check.
Q — Hello Celestine, what can we designers do to help developers who just can’t convert the designs properly.
Celestine Omin — If you can help with the conversion, do it and teach them how to do it.
Q — Pleased to have you here, celestine.. so as a designer I recently learnt to enjoy working closely with developers (like we literally share a desk) and this has helped me immensely in understanding their environment and thought process. What other soft skill(s) or workplace process can you recommend or advice to help us foster better relationships in our different workplaces?
Celestine Omin — Good inter-personal relationships, Good communication skills and empathy.
Q — Being an Engineering manager must have its challenges. What is the biggest challenge you have had in dealing with designers and developers?
Celestine Omin — I will say understanding the individual personalities and harnessing it in a way that it helps the common good of the team.
Q — Thank you for joining us. A big issue I’ve encountered (and I think many people have as well) is with the design handover process. Many times, I still have to go back to the designer to ask for clarifications. So my questions are;
- How do you handle the product planning at paystack up to the design process to enable everyone understands what each other is doing?
- If you’ve had these issue before, how were you ableism to solve it? I’m guessing there’s no one-size-fits-all solution but your perspective will be highly appreciated.
Celestine Omin — There’s no silver bullet to this. Which is why people should work in product teams. Constant communication is that only way to resolve these issues.
Q — Hello Celestine. Do designers have a say on which language or framework their designs are implemented on if they do, how best is this communicated to the developer.
Celestine Omin — I don’t think designs come with a framework. I may be wrong, but I don’t think they do.
Join Figma on SLACK: https://figma-africa.slack.com
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/figma_africa
INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/figmaafrica
