Your UX Team May Hate You
For many project teams there is an unspoken (or loudly spoken) divide between designers and developers. It’s the artists vs. the nerds. The classic clash between design and engineering, creativity vs. logic. It’s our jobs as developers to tell designers what can’t be done, and designer’s jobs to tell developers what they have to do anyways.
Needless to say, this is a terrible way of thinking. This isn’t to say all (or even most) teams consciously think this way, but if you find that you and your designers aren’t communicating much, or only communicating when there’s a problem, your designers probably aren’t your biggest fan.
That’s not good. UX and UI teams should have each other’s back. They are the Bonnie to your Clyde, the peanut butter to your jelly, the Michelle to your Barack, the Jay-Z to your Beyonce, the… you get my point.
Developers, Get Your Shit Together
Now, before you track down my address, I’m not blaming you guys for the lack of communication between your team and the UX team. Truthfully, I think the divide is a natural process for the following reasons:
- Designers don’t understand the engineering process, so they have no consideration of complexity when adding, changing, or removing design elements
- Engineers don’t understand the UX process, so we often settle with “almost pixel perfect”, or object certain design decisions because we think we have a “decent enough eye for UI” to make rejections / changes
But none of this changes with time, and you certainly can’t sit back and expect the other team to make the first moves. I know many of us are introverts, but we need to be more proactive as developers. Let’s be the hero.
Communication and more Communication
Let me tell you, there is nothing like listening to people’s problems that will get you on their good side faster. Here’s what my team did to drastically improve relations with our UX team:
We focused on them
What’s their process? What are the challenges they face day to day? What are the challenges they face with developers? How can we help?
Most importantly, we were sincere in our questions and responses. Nobody likes to be patronized.
We explained our process
We tell them common roadblocks we have, challenges we face working with UX teams, and what our general development process looks like.
The designers are disarmed at this point. We heard them out, and they know we are trying to help. Now is the time to tell them our perspective of the story. But it’s important to realize it’s the same story.
We learned a fuck ton
In just 2–3 hours of discussions, we learned the entire UX process (from a 10,000 foot view) and they learned ours. We realized they are on 6–8 projects working with 100 developers at any given time. They are spread thin, and they absolutely hate when their designs are blatantly ignored for something “easier” to develop without consulting them. They get blamed in the end. One of the designers said something that stood out to me:
“There are so many cool things we want to do. We want to push the boundaries, but we’re so afraid that developers will push back that we settle with simple designs just so we don’t run the risk of them ignoring or fighting against our comps.”
Now, she wasn’t referring to our team (fortunately), but the fact that she, and presumably other designers, felt that way, we knew we had to start collaborating more often (and push the other engineering teams as well). The conclusion was that our products are suffering as a result of our poor communication, and yours probably are too.
What Happens when you Join Forces
Fucking magic I tell you. Here were some immediate outcomes from our 3 hours of discussions:
We began collaborating on a design system
Our teams are working with each other to build a component library for the entire company. The design team was already working on this, but didn’t have the means to turn it into something more than a Sketch / Zeppelin reference the UX team could use. This is a huge step to create a consistent brand across our web apps, as well as speed up design & development.
We started forming post mortem meetings
We realized every project needs to evaluate how well designers and developers are working together, but designers are on too many projects to participate in team retros. Post mortems are a quarterly meeting we plan on hosting to discuss what went well between the teams, what didn’t, and give shout outs & rewards to those that went above and beyond the last quarter. We especially want to focus on rewarding excellent collaboration across UX and UI teams.
We started doing knowledge shares
We are also planning knowledge share sessions so we can learn skills from each other periodically. We realized how much benefit there is to understanding each other’s disciplines. Not only does it make us more knowledgeable individuals in our own fields, it makes collaboration more effective because we speak each other’s language.
We made friends
It’s always good to know people. It turns out the UX team weren’t a bunch of art majors with high opinions of themselves, and the engineering team weren’t a bunch of anti social know-it-alls. In fact, we realized there are many pain points we face together (ironically, common complaints are a good way to make positive connections). Plus, growing your professional network is always a good thing.
Final Words
At the end of the day, people hate ugly things, and people hate things that don’t work. Your designers are half of the puzzle to a successful project, and I would even say a successful front end development career. Do you really want to put up a mediocre craigslist lookalike on your portfolio? Nobody cares if it’s responsive. You can make poop responsive and dynamic, but it’s still poop.
Take a stand, and bring your teams together. I promise magical things will happen. Your company, your coworkers, and your customers will absolutely love you for it.
