Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Mei

As a UX designers in creating a design language system

I was lucky to have the role of bridging design and development teams for the past years. To be honest, it was not an easy job. Building up a design language system from zero required the knowledge of native UX patterns as well as technical insights. Below are some notes from my daily extensive communication work.

Hate:

“Not required in the MVP” or “Not feasible”

“Platform limitation” or “Not possible”

“Making no difference”

Of course, be a team player.

I was really really tired of these words. And having different product owners for each scrum team (design and development) made my life even harder. Adding the design review into the WoW and DoD did help on the table. And influencing the developers with a spirit of making a great product with craftsmanship brought the two teams closer.

notification badge

Push when there is a possibility.

A notification badge was developed without the drop shadow because it was not planed for the MVP. However, there was still one day left in that sprint. As the shadow is critical for the design, I brought nice coffee for the developers and they finished it. I knew that adding the shadow could be a one-day task. And if I haven’t pushed it, it will end up somewhere behind a long list in the backlog.

checkbox animation

Be understandable.

The checkbox animation in iOS didn’t have the desired sensitivity, though it was able to performance. Because the checkbox was not a native control, I understood that it would take some effort to fix. As the sprint was ending, I let it pass the design review and logged a bug in the backlog. Being reasonable at that time will help the collaborations in the long run.

Android date picker

Ask the same question to another developers.

When you hear something like “not possible” or “platform limitation”, you should ask the same question to another developer. Sometimes, you might get a complete different story. When developing the date pick in Android, I was disappointed by the “fact” of many design features are not customisable. I went directly to another developers and after 2 days of work, all design features were implemented successfully from Lollipop to Nougat.

Love:

“I will fix it, don’t worry.”

“Let’s co-design together! ”

toggle switch

Value designers’ effort and value design itself.

I worked hard in creating the mindset of one team. During everyday conversations, I use “we” instead of “I” to phrase sentence like “We can make it.” For example, when implementing the drop shadow of toggle switch in Android, we faced a big challenge in 9-patch. I started searching for the solution in Android studio by myself after work. That behaviour motivated the developer. And after one week of trying hard together, we finally got it work!

iOS, Android and HTML5 search box

Co-Design for platform friendly UI

With a lot of experience in native platforms, developers can have valuable input on UI design. To generate platform friendly UI, I organised a co-design session with the developers. I learned about the feasibilities and what I could and couldn’t play with in the design. And in the end, we came up with a design propose that has the look & feel from both native platforms and our design identity.

At last, have pizza, beer and a lot of fun TOGETHER with your DEVs!

Clap if you like this article ❤️ for a writer it means the world.

And follow me on medium to see more UX stories 👩🏻‍🎨. I will start my own publication when my followers hits 1K this year. Please help🙏 .If you are interested in my instagram, here it is.

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Love & Hate Relationship with DEVs was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Love & Hate Relationship with DEVs

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