Designers and developers: how to collaborate better

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Every industry has its own stereotypes about certain professions. Very often they interfere with fruitful cooperation. Maybe it's time to get rid of them? Let's start with designers and developers.



Between 2017 and 2018, Google produced a series of 24 short videos in which digital designer Mustafa Kurtuldu interviewed a variety of designers and developers, asking them about the ins and outs of their professions, from “ Becoming a Creative Coder ” to “UX Research and Usability Testing .” Despite the humorous title, “Designer vs. Developer,” the series’ goal was to understand the ins and outs of each profession, thereby encouraging further and more effective collaboration between the two disciplines.

the commenters on the video told a slightly mexico number data different story, one that demonstrated a certain level of dissatisfaction among the designers and developers. They didn’t have the same seamless collaborative experience as the people broadcasting from the screen – for whom interdisciplinary teams and design sprints seemed to be the norm.

Much of the problem with interdisciplinary collaboration stems from a misconception about who designers and developers really are and what they do.

“I think designers are seen as very creative people who work in an unusual, abstract way – a classic stereotype of the art student,” says Myles Palmer, a freelance digital designer. “Developers are the opposite. They are seen as geeks: they are nerds, they are super serious people who are set in a certain way. And that’s where the problems start, people think that when designers and developers work together, it’s a collaboration of polar opposites. Nonsense. One of the people who taught me a lot of the intricacies of design is a developer, so any opposition is not good for teamwork.”

Designers and developers should be seen as two sides of the same coin; designers need basic literacy in some programming languages ​​while developers need to understand typography and layout. And so, the debate about whether designers should code continues as usual (of course, they should know how to code at least a little. No one has ever seriously considered whether it is important for a magazine designer to be able to read).

Sharing skills and understanding of the discipline with each other is key to ensuring smooth workflows among teams at Figma, a design, development, and prototyping tool that facilitates real-time collaboration between teams.