This first time of working with developers as a sole product designer is important to me because I only worked with other designers to push our boundaries before, and our ideas, concepts as well as designs sat in the drawer and didn’t go to implementation. I was eager to work with developers because they can do magic on the design, turning static pixels into a real thing.

If you find a great developer. GIF by mylittlemiki

Thus, I would like to focus on the process of delivering design outcomes to developers and share my learnings with young designers who may have zero experience with developers. Just like me.

The developers are the users of my design file.

It’s like the UX design process that I would treat my design with the users. The developers are the users of my design file. I need to understand, communicate with, learn from, and work with them, so we can work together to ship a feature like a sports team.

Retrospectively, I think I did two basic but key things to make our jobs easier.

Talk to the developer as early as I can

Since our team has a five-weeks timeline for the challenge, from identifying a problem, ideation, to designing and developing, we had a conversation on what we can achieve in these five weeks, for example, developers’ preferred languages.

Then, when I worked on the design in the process, I shared my wireframes and mockups with links of prototype and numerous GIFs and videos. Especially in the remote environment, I felt the GIFs and videos I sent out to the team are useful because they are able to quickly skim the designs and to give me feedback on Slack (sometimes emojis are a great trick).

The final thing here is to remember people are always visual animals, and communicating a thing with images, sketches, or other visual elements is always helpful. For example, when my developer and I were discussing a feature of whether allowing users to view their profile easily or not. We typed our opinions back and forth, but a clear consensus formed when an image of this concept was brought up.

Yes, this is ugly but works very well. 😂

#reflections #collaboration #ux-design