For most teams, designer and developer collaboration is a painful issue. Different tools, different goals, and different languages often create a gap between UI application design and development. This gap results in delays, frustration, and a sub-optimal user experience in your products.

Bit is a game-changer. As a developer-first platform, Bit is how designers and developers can collaborate directly on the code components that developers build and that users experience in production.

With Bit, designers gain unprecedented superpowers to get involved in the development process itself: Visually see all components, preview new releases and changes, simulate components in different usage contexts, and even track the usage and impact of their design system.

Below you can find the key features that make Bit a must-have platform for modern app-building teams. For questions, don’t hesitate to contact experts or ask for a demo, or just comment below! I hope you enjoy 🚀

1. Designers can view all components built by developers

Bit empowers designers with full visibility to all the components created by developers in the organization. They have an available, accessible, and visual ‘Lego Box’ of all the UI pieces developers built, actually used in production.

Designers can easily learn if developers build components that match their design or not and can quickly fix design issues. They can discover and use components to plan new features with better design consistency while saving time for developers as well. It’s faster and better for everyone.

2. Designers can view and edit rendered components

Bit makes it easy for designers to see how developers implemented components, and give feedback through visual examples.

Every component in Bit is developed with visual documentation. This documentation includes rendered examples of each component so designers can instantly learn how each component looks like. These examples are rendered in an interactive editable playground, so designers can change their looks, and create examples for developers to turn into new versions.

3. Designers can preview simulations of real-world component usage

Bit has a very innovative and powerful feature called compositions. Theseare preview simulations of how a component looks like in different real usage contexts such as pages and applications that use this component.

Through compositions, designers can learn exactly how every change to a component will visually impact every feature, page, and application!

4. Designers can visually monitor new component versions

One of Bit’s super-powers is that it versions each component independently. This means you can release updates to specific components by incrementing their version, so you can quickly upgrade, replace, or hotfix any part of your UI. 10X releases, anyone?

And, these updates will get to all pages and applications that use this component, so one change can be swiftly delivered to all users.

But, with great power comes great responsibility. You need to make sure all new component versions are consistent with the design.

That’s why Bit gives designers the option to “time-travel” between versions and view each component’s history and review each version.

And, since Bit’s build pipeline is extendible and customizable, you can add automated steps (e.g. webhooks) that will create a new Jira/Asana/etc task for designers to review every new version as part of its release!

5. Design assets can be embedded in component MDX documentation — to compare

When working with tools like

By having design and code side-by-side you can instantly compare a component’s implementation to its design, and make sure every single type and state of the component is in 100% match with its design. This is a very quick and effective way to improve consistency from day one!

6. Designers can preview release impact on all pages and applications

Ripple (coming) is a component-driven release mechanism that continuously integrates UI changes in the entire organization. On every new version, it builds the graph of all impacted components in the organization.

With Ripple, changes propagate to all impacted projects, and every release comes with visual previews so designers can see how changes will actually look like on every single page and application… this is the future!

7. Getting adoption for your design system

Bit is a perfect tool for a modern design system!

Instead of creating a cumbersome library with a bunch of components glued together with a redundant documentation website on the side, Bit is an out-of-the-box component marketplace for the organization where all components can be shared and collaborated on across all different teams and projects.

Bit greatly helps in getting adoption for your design system, as developers can easily find and integrate the component they need — and even make changes locally in their projects. More adoption means better design consistency and more collaboration between designers and developers.

At the same time Bit democratize the development of components, it gives the organization tools to track the usage of components across all projects. This makes it easy for designers to learn which project adopted which components, in which version, and how they are being used. Cool, right? it really is.

8. Coming integrations to Figma, Invision DSM, Adobe DSM, Zeplin

Bit is perhaps the most extendible and customizable tool ever built. In fact, Bit is built 100% from… Bit components.

This means that Bit’s development tools and cloud platform can be very easily and quickly extended and integrated to support popular design tools!

For example, imagine connecting your Figma components to your Bit.dev components, so that you can visually see the rendered code right in Figma, and see the designs right in your component on Bit.dev.

This connection is the most direct, powerful, and productive connection between design and code ever created in modern app development. These integrations are already in the works in collaboration between the teams, and ETA for the first integrations GA is mid-late 2021. So stay tuned!

9. Designers can collaborate directly on UI code

Bit is the first tool in the world to bridge the designer-developer gap from the developer’s end. Instead of making it easy for developers to see the design, Bit makes it easy for designers to see the code developers build.

Before Bit, designers would make designs and “handoff” them over to developers. The first time they will see what the developers built will often be in production, or at best on a staging environment.

Bit brings designers into the development process itself, with smart tools to view, interact, and collaborate directly on real UI components. For a team working together to build modern frontend applications, this is a true game-changer in delivery speed, quality, and consistency. It’s also more fun!