I’ve been working with more than 40+ developers directly, have had delightful and painful experiences. After years of frontline battle, I sincerely feel that developers are designers’ most important comrades, instead of the enemy. And my most precious knowledge, insights, and growth are from the help of developers.
We don’t talk much about product realization in school. All the blue-sky projects we designed in school are great practices, but the real world is different. It’s meaningless if a product design will never be shipped. It takes me a while to understand that designers and developers work with different methodologies, focus, and goals. Without developers, we still can make good-looking interfaces, prototypes, illustrations, or animation, but not a great product, never.
Development resources are previous. As a designer, my first working principle is not to block the development progress. Second, to ensure the great outcome of our product design, it deserves my best effort to design the workflow and relationship with the developers. That’s way more important than the design deliverables alone.
I want to share some experiences and tips to help designers to build and strengthen relations with developers, plus examples dealing with edge case scenarios with 😈devs at the end of the related sections.