Ask HN: What are your thoughts on pairing between Developers and Designers UX/UI
Background: I work at typical shop with business team giving requirements and IT building web apps for them, and the end customers. There are few UX+UI folks (designers), but the developer to designer ratio is approx 50:1. The scope of designer's responsibility starts with ux research and ends at designing in sketch & invision. Some time ago we invested in making UI consistent across web apps and created our guidelines (styleguide + some more) mostly based on Brad Frost Atomic UI Design [0], and material ui components. It keeps evolving as new patterns emerge and we are trying to cover both static UI components and their behaviors, till bigger abstractions like page templates (Work in progress)
Question: What should be the engagement model for designers in such situation? Should they pair like other developers (then we need to hire more), or should they work like architects, who invest more time with developers in the beginning, but as system patterns get settled, developers work on their own.
What do you all see in your organizations?
[0]: https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/chapter-2/
3 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadThe engagement model should be a bit of both:
- Designers who maintain the design system are like the architects, and advocate for other developers to use the system patterns. They should also partner with developers to ensure that the UI components are opinionated.
- You still need to consider your web app's overall UX flows though, so designers are still needed to mock up new features for the developers to implement. Even with a robust design system, there are many ways to easily create unintuitive or messy designs. A designer should be assigned to each team and be in charge of mocking up the team's work and ensuring that the team is properly using the design system.
For your second point (on UX flows), what stage in product iterations do you think those decisions should be made?
I feel those decision belong more to product management and designers, and after they are finalized, designers need to communicate them properly e.g. via design reviews of new artifacts with developers before start of development, and/or document screen flows properly.
In either case, to my original question, the interaction is not really "pairing" with developers.
Agree? Disagree?