How to Bring UX Design to Your Development Team

Oct 4, 2019

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In order to evangelize user experience with your dev team you have to indoctrinate them into the design process. A common mishap is waiting to deliver something pixel perfect to the development team. This puts them in a defensive position where you may experience pushback. Instead of waiting for reaction, be proactive. Seek to enlist developers early on so they can help you design together.

Use Design Frameworks

Design processes like Design Sprints, Lean UX, and Design thinking are facilitation methods that work to provide structure for engaging developers into the design process. Although, they’re usually left out of quarterly planning, board meetings, and user test sessions, these types of workshops, strategy sessions, or brainstorming sessions (whatever you want to call them) are vital to bringing UX to your development team.

Throw UX Developers In The Deep End of the UX Research Pool

Case in point, the fastest way to bring UX to your dev team and speed up their learning curve is to get them to do user testing or user research with you and along your side. In this way they can see first hand how users interact with the user interface in which they have or will be developing.

Case Study of Doing Just That…

I attended a UX Speakeasy Meetup here in San Diego, CA at Qualcomm’s auditorium where Jarod Spool was speaking. In his talk he referenced a lady who was one of the top UX Designers working for the federal government in DC. She was one designer with hundreds of developers. How was she able to bring UX to her development team?

The Point: Doing is better than Memorizing

She didn’t have them memorize vocabulary of UX Jargon. Although, that may have helped with language barrier, it wouldn’t have met the team’s deadlines. Instead she had the developers volunteer to observe user research of their designs. Then the developer would improve their design, she’d print it and hang it up next to a developer’s work that had not participated in user research. By doing this A/B variation comparison peer to peer review, more and more developers began volunteering to participate in user research studies. Why? Because they say an improvement in the ones that did, and who doesn’t want to improve their designs? Right?

UX Developers and UX Engineers are UX Designers too.

Therefore, think about how you onboard and indoctrinate UX Design with your team. Especially, if you’re a design team of one, or research team of one. How are you going to bring UX to your Design Team?

Comments

6 responses to “How to Bring UX Design to Your Development Team”

great2bnate

October 5, 2019

In the next article, I’ll share how to go from prototype to code with Invision. Yet, for now, let me know your questions or concerns in the comments below.

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David Bradshaw

October 5, 2019

I love having designers on the development sprint team. It keeps us all connected and can provide instant feedback (usually technical limitations) before a design goes too far.

I have worked on teams where the design team isn’t even in the same building and when they delivered a link to Invision or a Sketch file you had to sometimes guess since they would keep working On the next feature and never come back to the one delivered. I didn’t like that approach. So I am happy when we are all collaborating.

One interesting thing for design to code for the VD side is a tool called Zeplin. Which takes the Sketch file and shows it with lines and all for measurement and even shows basic CSS styles it thinks based on Sketch. It’s pretty nice for quickly taking VD and going to code. Plus it means developers don’t need Sketch which isn’t cheap and can use the web or free Zeplin app.

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Liz F.

October 5, 2019

Sometimes the thought of opening up the design to others can lead to fear of schedule/cost overruns, when really the question should be ‘Can we afford not to involve the developers/stakeholders early on?’ I’ve found developers are more enthusiastic (understandably) when approaching a product that has sound research/reasoning behind it. If that can be provided by the developer(s) in an objective fashion, the buy-in stands to be even greater.

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great2bnate

October 6, 2019

Great point Liz!

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great2bnate

October 6, 2019

David,
Sounds like you’ve got a great opportunity to manage this trade-off between design and development.
Have you tried Invision’s Inspect? It’s like Zeplin, but with less software integrations.
I’ve found Lean UX tremendously collaborative. Where a developer builds a tracer bullet, and a designer designs a wireframe both commencing at the same time, after viewing a white board sketch. Then they meet together to compare progress, tweak, and continuing designing. Both have to be open to one another synergistically. This is where they can go further than ever before, even pushing technical boundaries where competitors have stalled.

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Tofer

October 7, 2019

It’s already been answered here, but at the end of the day, if you can somehow prove a benefit to the development team, then they will be on-board. Can you show them that these processes will reduce their workload? Can you also show them what users are actually saying about certain features? Bringing them into the processes will help them understand the reasoning behind the Why. In turn, the developers will stick to the design/interaction intentions.

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