Designers, Talk To Your Devs
At a big company like Wayfair, communication between teams can sometimes feel a little disconnected. Product designers and engineers are typically trying to keep up with an ever-growing backlog of tickets, and we don’t always talk to each other the way we should. In an ideal world, we would consult with each other early and often, but, you know, sometimes schedules get in the way.
That’s not a good excuse. Recently, on the Wayfair design team, we’ve been doing our best to not let ourselves off the hook for this, and have been working hard to implement better communication practices between design and development. In the spirit of sharing what we’ve learned, here’s what’s been working for us:
Have regular stand-ups or check-ins
Collaboration is sort of like flossing your teeth — quick, easy, and painless if you do it regularly, but agonizing if you forget about it until it’s too late and you’ve built up a thick layer of design-debt gingivitis.
Brief, regular check-ins can mean the difference between a product that sails through development, and one that requires hours of clarification and revision down the line.
Sitting down early to speak with the developers who will be building your design doesn’t just save time; it leads to a better, more well thought-out product. A personal example: Early in the process of designing a new tool, I drew up a number of quick wireframes that represented the different big-picture approaches that I saw for the project. I was really excited about some of them, but they were large ideas that would require a lot of developer effort. A quick conversation between myself, my product manager, and one of the engineering leads helped me immediately understand which ideas simply wouldn’t work, and which ideas were actually easier to build than I thought they would be. As one of Wayfair’s newer product designers, this didn’t just help me narrow down my project it also gave me insight into what the developers I work with can do, and taught me how to design for them in the future. (sit down and be humble gif )
Invite your developers to user testing
At Wayfair, we run weekly user testing sessions to push on our ideas and better understand how our customers use our site. Every week, we gather a treasure trove of insights that help us design better products for our average users, who, as 45- to 65- year-old women, have slightly different desires than our largely 20-something product team.
This information is massively helpful for us, but we’re not designing in a vacuum. Getting your developers on the same page can help them understand why you made the decision you made, and why your design can be necessary even if it’s going to be harder for them to build. They begin to understand those customers’ pain points. In Wayfair’s case, this means that they will be thinking of how 63-year-old Kathy (one of our user personas) will use our product as they code.
In a recent sprint planning meeting, design and development got into a small debate over whether we should make a change to our Room Planner feature. The design team argued that users needed to be able to drag and drop products into the room. The developers wanted us to understand that this seemingly small ticket would take up a week of bandwidth and would push back already scoped projects. However, after inviting members of the development team to moderate and take notes at our Testing on Tap event, they got a look into users’ frustration as they tried to drag and drop into the tool. Seeing the problem firsthand gave them more than just a data point on a slide: they gained empathy for the user’s experience.
Work Together Outside of Work
You sketch pretty pictures, they write the words and numbers that make your pictures work. And if you work at a place like Wayfair, you’re both pretty passionate about what you do. You both have big ideas for world-changing products, and you need each other to make those ideas happen. Working together on side projects, hackathons, or pro-bono designs can reframe the way you see your working relationships with other teams. Planning a project from the ground-up or crunching a design/build challenge in 24 caffeine-fueled hours can give you a deeper insight into how your developers work and what they need from you to code products that are true to your vision.
Recently, Boston Schools Fund, an education nonprofit that’s affiliated with us, approached us about developing a tool that would help Boston parents find and learn more about schools in their area. My co-designer Monique and I signed on to design the product in our spare time, and a few of the developers I work with joined in to build it.
From the beginning, we were all in it together. The whole team– designers, developers, PMs, and analytics– took part in all stakeholder meetings. Because of this, we all had an understanding of BSF’s needs, and were able to ask each other thought-provoking questions that pushed the project forward. Though Monique and I built wireframes and screens on our own time, we held weekly design reviews with the whole team, and received a ton of feedback about how to make the site more efficient to build and easier to navigate.
Typically, at Wayfair, we focus on building features or updating existing products, so it’s rare that I’ll get the chance to work on bringing a new idea to life. Working outside of the usual constraints of our work environment was refreshing for the whole team, and has helped us recognize new communication strategies that work for us.
Basically, what I want to say is this: no matter how disconnected our work can sometimes feel from the greater product environment, we’re all on the same team. Reframing the way you work together can help you remember that.
