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INNOVATIVING DESIGN PRACTICE
Pixel Perfect
Making sure that users can appreciate a product’s quality all the way to the backend.
What do you do if engineering doesn’t have an eye for visual details? You can provide specifications with ridiculous amounts of detail, or…
You can educate them on Pixel Perfect execution
Recently led design for a visualization product where the engineering team was offshore, on the other side of the world and did not have much front-end experience. It became obvious that we had a quality problem and so we looked for ways to mitigate. One of the issues we could see through communications — mostly JIRA comments — was that, even though we were sending detailed specs, the offshore team didn’t see the details the same. Even if a detail was not spec’d its state and relationship could be extracted via Zeplin. Telling the team to use Zeplin to check details didn’t help if they didn’t see the detail in the first place to know to check it.
A major issue was that, though we used consistent fonts and spacing we hadn’t spec’d them every time — even though the same design pattern was reused different developers were implementing different instances. If something wasn’t spec’d per instance that something would be implemented differently between…
