We now live in a world where Design and Engineering work as "One". This is a team effort to deliver a fantastic user experience together.
Here are five examples for "ways of working" with a development & design team.
1. Avoid custom styles! Let's use a design system!
Most front-end engineering teams use some type of library or CSS framework for styles used across the application. These often contain common styles such as defined margins, colors, and other classes that engineers use to make for quicker development.
So...if you decide to sprinkle in a custom margin, font size, or component, the engineer has to write custom CSS from scratch to override base styles. This is fine once in a while, but it gets tedious really quickly. Save these custom styles for special occasions or when absolutely necessary. After all, designing within a framework simplifies many decisions for us, which is often a good thing.
2. Pull Engineering In Early
Conducting weekly design reviews will be super important to understand technical constraints or enhancements.
3. Listen to Engineering Feedback
Feedback is always welcome so everyone can keep each-other honest.
4. Always Be Teaching Each-Other
Its important to educate one another on best practices so we can be up to times and deploy faster
5. Follow a Process Everyone Agrees On
This could include:
- Identify new feature requests
- Groom epics with team
- Identify tasks for those epics for both engineering and design
- Create acceptance criteria on all tickets. What steps make the ticket complete?
- Review design (flows, wire-frames, HIFI comps) with engineering often
- Design to supply engineers with deliverable specs for development
- Identify or update components needed to be included into StoryBook or similar
- Design to review engineering pull requests with a live link
- Design approves pull request
- Updated designs are reflected in both production & Storybook
- Rinse and repeat based on internal/external feedback
Let me know your thoughts! Message me on LinkedIn
-Anthony
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