Tips for working with your tech team
1. Design document delivery
Deliver clear and understandable design documentation with all the specifications and annotation are very basic for UX/UI designers. Well-organized design files (journeys and prototypes)help our developers deeply understand every single behaviour of your journey. In my design team, we used to use SketchMeasure to markdown specifications, but now we are transferred into Zeplin, which can indicate all the specs when we upload the Sketch file. Besides, it is also very common for us to build prototypes which can visually demonstrate animations, so as a designer, I would also write specs for animations like bounce rate, speed, curve and so on in my document.
2. Join refinement meetings
I’ve experienced a certain period in our team when we only review UI defects in the testing stage, which was difficult to address all the defects as the development was saving effort for either new project or some small changes. So later on, we started to join the backlog refinement meeting every two weeks with our pods, then we can review the built demo in the meeting and point out any misalignments to developers directly. As it is I’m the middle of the development, our dev plan is still manageable at this time.
3. Keep daily communication with developers
From my perspective, being visible and reachable to every team member facilitates my daily communication in our cross-functional team. I always encourage my tech to pin me on slack whenever they have questions on the design. I would also encourage designers to reach out developers when they design something new and unsure if it is technically possible.
4. Don’t downgrade your design because of the MVP
Some times when the design has been signed off and the development is already started, we would still get some response that they are going to delivery the design step by step. Yes, here what I mean is the MVP. Since MVP becomes a common thing in teams working in agile, we always need to consider to cut off some design for the first iteration. However, we would suggest our designers downgrade the entire design file just because of MVP delivery. By contrast, we can mark down what is MVP and what is out of scope on our design file, so when it goes to DAY 2, our developers and product managers can have a clear view of what has been built and what they are going to build in DAY 2.
5. Understand some coding
Never stop to learn: I guess learning code is not a new thing for designers as there are so many benefits we can get if our designers understand some coding like making more advanced design proposal and challenge tech constraints. Learning coding would help designers get what developers are saying and how they building stuff. For instance, I took some coding classes to experience the programming by myself, so once upon a time, I did challenge feedback from one of our developers as that not impossible technologically, but may cost some effort to do. We then got an agreement to make some tech challenges instead of weakening a good user experience.
