UX <> Front-end | 1. When the shyness goes down and kills motivation
Dear reader,
Did you have a chance to cooperate with this type of front-end dev?
What’s my task?
Is it enough?
Sorry, it’s 5:02pm, I should be at home already.
Do we have to do that?
Can we take care of animations later on?
I bet you did. If not, you eventually will, no worries. Therefore, you should be prepared for taking care of different situations where dealing with such developer might be a big challange.
First of all, don’t blame Carl (let’s call him Carl) for anything. You have no idea about his background, situation at home, physical condition or just the way he rolls. Remember, it is not your job to “fix” that kind of person. He works and behaves the way he does and there is no point of forcing him to change. What you have to do is to develop some sort of social bond between you and him.
Make it personal
Create personal connection
It is highly possible that Carl has some weird hobby or interest. Whether this is playing chess, jazz concerts or planting trees, learn something about it.
I am not thinking of diving into some boring stuff you are not interested in. I’m thinking about learning some basic things about it so you can catch up with non-professional conversation with Carl. Try to be curious, asking questions and pretending you are really into sobject “x”.
Challenge him!
Carl is not really a big fan of cool and good looking animations or interactions, and that’s fine. Your job is to show him really great products or solutions and encourage him (UX evangelism!) to come up with something similar.
Do you think our app could behave like that?
I wonder if you could do something like this?
This seems to be really hard to be implemented (give him out of the box solution), but do you think you could manage to implement it in our app?
Is it hard to implement it? (of course it’s easy, but let him do his job).
Be accurate and organised
Color coding, dimensions and spacing
When you provide list of changes to Carl, don’t you ever say things like:
Let’s make this headline a bit brighter.
We need more spacing below this button.
We need bigger font on this button.
This will lead you only to one place, and place only — another iteration and dozen of new changes. What you have to do is provide Carl with straightforward, direct and simple list of changes, eg:
CTA Button: “Click here”, border 2px, font 16px, color #4990E2
Top Navigation: Background color: #ff0099, bottom border 1px, paddings 4px 4px
This type of comments will require getting some HTML / CSS knowledge and practical experience. Even if you are not into it at the moment, it will eventually pay off, trust me.
Provide him with out of the box solutions
From time to time, Carl may come up with some excuses like:
We have to do it the easy way.
This will be time consuming to implement that.
This is not possible, at least not right now.
Well, this is usually a bit frustraiting, but you have to remain calm. Google the solution, even if Carl could do that, send it to him and show him that it’s actually quite easy. You may also try forcing him to do research by himself, but in most cases you will end up in the same place where you were before.
Organise design space
Carl won’t manage to find desings in your emails from last month. He won’t spend time browsing any folders looking for “this design with small changes from last week”. If you want to smoothly cooperate with Carl, make sure to do the following:
- keep all designs up to date, in one place (eg. InVision),
- remember about naming (instead of HomePage22211a_changes.png, name it: HomePage_WithTopBanner_Final.png),
- send list of changes comapring to previous version (Carl is not Design person, he won’t spot some minor changes),
- add comments to specific elements using InVision review tool.
This is the first article about improving your cooperation with shy and not-motivated front-end developers. Stay tuned for some more and like it only when you enjoyed it.
Cheers.
