Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

This process is fraught with problems. Ideas aren’t shared as much with stakeholders to solicit feedback, and changes to the signed-off design can have harsh consequences. So these days designers work much more collaboratively with other teams (i.e. development, content strategy) throughout a project to bring a creative vision to life. However, it can still be hard for developers to accurately translate a designer’s intent into a real-life feature or product. Meanwhile, designers often wonder why the finished product differs from their designs. Both teams also need to be a lot more adaptable and prototype rapidly, test and iterate interactive versions of what they’re working on. And so the designer-developer handoff is unfortunately not always smooth. It can be very time-consuming, costly, and sometimes it even leads to the failure of the entire product. In this article, we’ll explore the main reasons handoffs tend to be problematic and some of the best practices and strategies both parties should follow to bridge the disconnect. Common pitfalls during the designer-developer handoff “Communication and alignment on the expected end result is by far the biggest challenge in the designer-developer handoff,” points out Harish Narayan, a product manager on the Adobe XD team. “Both designers and developers spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on trying to close the gaps.” Collaborate, don’t hand off One of the problems might actually lie in the terminology. “I believe that ‘handoff’ connotes that the design is handed to the developer, and it’s now the developers responsibility to bring the product to life,” Harish explains. “However, I think the design is not complete until the product is used by users. Therefore, it’s imperative that designers and developers communicate throughout the design and development phases.” Bermon Painter, innovation and strategy lead at EY wavespace, agrees that ‘handoff’ is a tricky word and has found that work is rarely handed back for clarification or improvement. When he worked with a large financial services company, the business would define requirements and hand off to the content and marketing team to create a content spec. That team would then hand off to the information architecture team to create wireframes, who would then hand off to the UX team to create high-fidelity mockups, who would then hand off to the development teams. “This level of one-way communication reminds me a bit of the game telephone,” Bermon sighs. “Every handoff loses a percentage of the context and knowledge at each subsequent step. By the time you get to the end, the message is a mutated version of the original. This same issue perpetuates with the concept of a designer–developer handoff. By the time the development team is provided with the various handoff documents, the message isn’t quite the same, and they must interpret any specs they receive. Context is lost, and intent is often misinterpreted. The end result is often a set of features that don’t fully serve their intended purpose.” Don’t over-specify or be over-protective of your work Designers and developers also inherently approach things from different points of views, Harish Narayan believes, which means there is often a lot of back and forth to clarify specifications, absorb changes, and reduce diffs. Designers are not always aware of existing or intended reusable components and tokens in design either. In the absence of a design system, teams therefore end up doing a lot of redundant work that leads to inconsistencies, which delay the time to market. “Designers who rely on over-specifying their work, without working through potential edge cases or limitations often find themselves frustrated,” adds product strategy consultant Gretchen Anderson, author of Mastering Collaboration, a new book on making working together less painful and more productive. Gretchen Anderson has written a handbook for those who wrangle people, processes, and products. Some of the don’ts to keep in mind to ensure a smoother handoff include not guarding your work, not assuming that the developers can bring to life whatever is designed, and not getting overly influenced by the developers’ feedback at the expense of the user experience. Don’t forget to account for all the states of a design Another perennial mistake is to not account for all the states of a design, cautions DesignOps expert Ben Buchanan. “I don’t mean just basics like focus and hover, but things like success and failure states for an interaction,” he clarifies. “These all need designs and on-voice microcopy. If they’re not supplied, the developer will usually have to make something up so they can keep working.” Strategies to follow to improve collaboration