theuxblog.com – Medium | Saurabh Kumar

When two different people (the Designer and the Developer) with completely different knowledge and perspectives come together to make something work, in this case, the product.

I have lived my entire life in India, and right from our childhood, we were mentally hardwired that anything other than an Arranged Marriage is equivalent to committing a crime. So almost 90% of Indians are still Arranged married and after observing so many such marriages, you can never ignore some facts about them which are highly analogous to the designer-developer relationship.

Arranged Marraige

1. They usually come from very different backgrounds, lifestyles, and often they wouldn’t have ever met each other until they get married.
2. In spite of the differences, they strive to make the relationship work. Similarly in a designer-developer relationship, they too have many arguments, fights, adjustments and many happy times too when everything is going on well.
3. Even when they start hating each other, the one reason that still makes them put every effort to stay together is their kids, and of course in our case its the product.
4. The husband generally goes to work and the wife manages the home (A typical Indian family, but times are changing and fortunately, women are coming out too!). In short, they have a defined division of labor, but that’s not it. There are some husbands who lend their hands for helping out their wives and vice-versa. Similarly, a great product is made when the developer and the designer help each other in their respective tasks.

It goes without saying that the developer-designer relationship can either workout to be the best thing ever or it might even turn out to the most disastrous thing.

So how do we ensure that this inter-dependence is nurtured in a proper way? How can a designer and a developer come together to make something really awesome? Here are three of the many things which I suppose could help you out :

Communication

More often than not, the Designer-Developer relationship is like that of two people who don’t even understand each other’s language. As tourists, stretching and saying the same words out slowly again and again never helps in this case!

People need to communicate!
That is basic!
But somehow when it comes to a designer-developer relationship, it hardly is ever given any importance. Does a designer know what a developer means by an “Accordion” or a “carousel”? Does a Developer know what a designer means by “white-space” or “leading”?

Communication.

A shared understanding of each other’s terminologies is the need of the hour. I wish there was a resource where one could have all of it listed out with examples. Lets take a close look, the UI designer thinks in terms of grids, layouts, and the most intuitive way for a designer to explain a component to a developer is by quoting an existing resource, for example, “I am thinking we could have photo viewer like Facebook”. A developer would call it a “Modal” or a “Light box”. And when it comes to developers, lets face it, everything cannot be created from scratch. Developers refer libraries and frameworks like jquery plugins, bootstraps, and several other CSS/Javascript plugins, additionally having the link to these plugins/libraries/framework components in the resource would be great!

How can Developers help out Designers?

Dear Developers,

The design is what the users look at! Designers are the dreamers! They imagine and construct the future experience and feel of the product. They figure out all possible design solutions and choose the best one. By making the product look subtly beautiful, They let the product capture the attention of the user.

As a Developer, you need to make the designers understand the feasibility of a solution. The designer might want a fancy new feature but it is you who knows that it is not feasible at this stage, so rather than just saying that its not possible, it would be really helpful if you could make them understand the shortcomings and this is where communication comes into the play. Have a little session where in you can explain the basics of a framework like bootstrap! Show them what all components are at your disposal so that it helps the designer understand what all options are available.

Just letting them know of what is feasible and what is not, or the time constraints would be a great starter. Of course if you have got the time and horsepower to make anything that a designer dreams, then go for it! We need that creativity to get translated into products!

How can Designers help out Developers?

Dear Designers,

The Developers are like artisans, they are the ones who will help you in sculpting your dream in to the Real World. So a developer has to be an integral part of a designers world.

A designer, if willing, can actually halve the efforts required by the whole team in building the products. For starters, writing the design specifications for the UI can help the developers immensely. And if you could learn the tids and bits of CSS and then write the specifications in CSS (Believe me its as simple as ABC) you would make it so much more simpler for the Developer.

Wireframes, Prototypes, help the developers

Apart from design specifications having wire-frames, clickable prototypes could help the developer plan his code in a much efficient way than ever. I have devised a workflow by which a simple exercise of Information Architecture could help the back end developers design the database schema, help the Visual designer work on design and also the front end developer start working simultaneously. As this article is just to provide you with the most basic guidelines, I would be writing a separate article on the workflow in the upcoming weeks.

Conclusion

These are just a few tips, just the tip of the iceberg as they call it. Once again, the designer-developer relationship is very important! It can either make or break the product. We need to focus more on this intersection of design and development. So if you have any suggestions/tips, do mention them in comments.

And yes, If you liked the article, do hit the recommend button. And you can always contact me at [email protected]

The Designer-Developer relationship is like an Arranged marriage. was originally published in theuxblog.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.