Collaborative design process between design and development team
In many organizations and agencies, developers are not included too much in setting up the project and design process until it’s time to do what they do the best – making things “alive”.
Here in Kontra, we believe that in order to create an amazing final product there needs to be close collaboration between designers and developers. That includes clear communication and transparent workflow from both sides in almost every step of development.
WHY THIS MATTERS?
The great thing about including developers in the design process is that they can detect some elements that might cause problems in the future so they can save hours of fixing on both sides.
Another crucial thing about collaboration is that sometimes designers start to fantasize about complicated new features that have never been done before in such an environment, so developer’s job here is to remind designers what can be done in given time that they have and what can be done in particular.
Sometimes crazy ideas from designers and realistic attitude of developers involved in some new ideas which are exactly what where designers looking for in first place, but they didn’t know that yet.
HOW TO INCREASE COLLABORATION
To increase collaboration even better and to maintain better work relationship, we are not separated into different offices. Instead, we sit at the same office, table by the table, so we comment and discuss all the time each other’s progress, not just on the internal meeting of a project.
The results are great on many levels. By that way of communication, the feedbacks are shorter and productivity is better, we can share ideas with someone and that very moment and comment on them, and we also with every day exactly know what is skill level of who.
To be under the same roof also helps designers to become more informed about dev topics and developers can more quickly respond to design suggests and ideas. Small group talks and just lessening lead to new useful information and cool new ideas!
CONCLUSION AND FRIEND’S ADVICE
Cooperate and use one another, two heads are smarter than one. Don’t be that kind of office where designers do all the research, analysis and implementation without use of any knowledge of developers. Because if you don’t cooperate together at some point on the project, when designers are satisfied with what they made, and they are ready to forward the concept to the development team, at that moment problems start.
Developers start asking logical and technical questions about certain things which designers didn’t think about in that way and saying that to do something like that will take ages to implement or even worse, “that’s not even possible”.
