Communication with developers

There's a relatively high level of satisfaction with design-to-dev process (~7-8).

• Trust between dev and visual design is critical
• Good communication makes a big difference
• Need to understand common goals
• A coherent system is a common goal

“Breakdown bw design and dev comes from inability to communicate that system — need to articulate the unknowns as well”

• Need to understand individual expertise

Design takes time and mistakes are part of the process.

• The design won’t be done before you work it out in code.

“Designers need to make impractical things”

There's a desire to make life easier for devs.

• They can feel like their requests are a burden
• That it can take a long time to get to the proper solution — is it worth that time?

Handoff is an opportunity to communicate intentionality.

• But there aren’t any good standards for handoff
• Hard to know what to communicate to your dev
• When every detail matters, how do you avoid overkill and redundancy?

“I would say once a designer has made a choice (space, layout, etc) I would hope they would understand that there is a reason.”

Detailed communication takes time — it can be hard to know what to communicate or how to communicate it.

• Could an atomic system help this? A system of communicable design quanta.
• Could an interaction library help this?
• Could a design system help this?

Communication is critical, but has a cost.

• Developers want a good system and a clear vision
• Low level atomic design variables (as in Atomic CSS) are a helpful constraint and a good communication tool
• Whitespace scale is valuable
• Common colors, built with accessibility in mind
• Common type scale
• A simple way to communicate alignments

“Once you’ve got this small box of Legos that you’ve fussed over. Once those are established, it’s so easy to build.”

“I work better with a box of constraints. The constraints help it keep track of everything.”