Collaborating with developers in different teams

When I’m leading the design of user-centred products and services, I often work collaboratively with developers to deliver them. At TPXimpact, we always strive for a ‘one-team’ approach, embedding our designers in multidisciplinary or blended teams. However, sometimes designers and developers are located in different teams responsible for each delivering an aspect of the product. This can create challenges for everyone if there are silos or miscommunication. That’s why it’s important to bridge gaps and ensure that the user experience isn’t impacted.

Creating good collaborative conditions

Everyone wants to make sure that something usable and valuable is released to the people that need it. We rely on each other to achieve this goal, so it’s important to bridge gaps to create positive collaborative conditions, and achieve the best outcomes for our users. 

When working on central government projects, most of the time the whole team will go through a service assessment. Point 6 of the GOV UK standard is about having a multidisciplinary team and point 7 requires you to work in an agile way. 

Without collaboration across both teams, there can be confusion when we interpret the technical requirements, meaning work has to be re-designed, scrapped or can’t be achieved. For developers, the challenges may be similar, they may have questions about components and accessibility or need additional context about the users in order to size their work or write useful acceptance criteria. The lack of collaboration in these situations ultimately delays solving the user’s problem. 

Bridging the gap and collaborating with developers in different teams

Decide on positive ways of working

Working in different teams a handover process is unavoidable. Before you start designing or developing anything, meet and decide how this process will work. This means you can embed good communication and processes from the start and balance everyone’s needs. During the session, learn what each team needs from the other and the best way to meet that need. This might include knowing how and when to hand work over and who is involved in those conversations. Attend each other’s meetings and become familiar with each other.

Involve the development team in the design process

When designs are in progress, involving the development team in sessions where they can ask questions, feedback and suggest inputs for iterations is really valuable for everyone. 

As a designer, you’ll be able to learn about the technical aspects of the product that affect the front end, what can be achieved and how design decisions can affect delivery timelines. You’ll learn about what battles are worth fighting and how complex software development can actually be. You’ll also help development teams understand your design decisions, accessible design choices and the overall journey for the product, which can affect how they might prioritise the development work of these features. Developers can offer simpler solutions to potentially complex designs, and compromising on these can save a lot of time.

When possible, involve your product manager in these discussions, so you can discuss priorities, dependencies and outcomes together instead of in silos. 

Create thorough design documentation

Software developers need to understand designs in detail to implement them successfully. Create opportunities to break down your designs with them. It helps them turn your journeys into acceptance criteria. Development teams use this to understand when work is complete and meets the needs of users. Talk about how your design works and behaves, what problems you are solving and how interactions impact other parts of the journey.

Things that could be useful to include are:

• URLs

• page names

• intended behaviour of interactions and elements (for example, animations, changing states)

• front-end designs

• error states and error messages

• accessibility considerations (including explicit WCAG criterion)

• style classes or components

• journey maps

• prototypes

Make sure your design is final

Providing developers with a final version of the design is really helpful. Overriding things you’ve already given them can be confusing and frustrating if development work has already begun. If it’s unavoidable, clearly communicate about it as soon as you can, so that effort isn’t wasted and changes can be factored in as soon as possible. 

Collaborate during the quality assurance step of development

After the development work has started, collaborate on quality assurance. As a designer, you can be confident that what is being built matches what was designed. You can also test the work-in-progress build as it is closer to what will be released to users, such as finding out how compatible it is with assistive technology. Working this way allows you to give feedback to developers early, so that they can make changes before any testing has started, which is more effective and efficient for the whole team.

Putting these considerations into practice has helped me become a more versatile design leader. I have adapted my decision making and mediation skills, making sure they are underpinned by the needs of the whole multidisciplinary team. This has made me able to consider both design and technical requirements. Whilst working in a blended team, I have been able to support colleagues to overcome challenges and deliver great work in a collaborative way.