How to make a developer fall in love with you as a designer

As designers, we certainly know that the handover process between designers to developers has always been tricky. Why? Because this situation will be full of pushbacks, technical limitations, and disappointments. Every company has its own complexity.

Developers themselves are the last person to hold your design before it reaches the user. When the handover process doesn’t run smoothly, it will result in a poor output experience when your product reaches the users.

Different team=Different style

In the beginning, we initiated some discussion and deep digging of the company’s situation with developers regarding the handover process. This handover problem arose because we don’t have a standardized process, so each stream/sub-product team will have a different process. Why did this happen?

Each developers team in the stream/sub-product will use different tools. So this will make designers and developers need time to adjust the process and tools used.

There are 2 different handover processes; the first process uses Zeplin, and one uses Figma. The following is a list of problems that arise:

• Designers need extra time to upload design files from Figma to Zeplin
• Developers didn't know how to use Figma as a handover tool

Approaches

To solve these problems, designers and developers must sit together, and after doing some discussions, we found some problems that need to be solved. Start with the question:

“How to optimize the handover process with the current condition of the company?”

We initiate some activities between designers and developers, and I will explain in more detail in the next section.

System standardization

After we understand the situation and the conclusion to tackle this problem is:

“We need to standardize whole system.”

First, we need to prepare a strong foundation to create this system. This foundation consists of architecture to describe the distribution, workflow, tools used.

1. Build an Architecture

As a company that has many products, we have a lot of designer teams and developer teams. Of course, this creates its own complexity. We need to understand how the holding company’s value can still be related to the sub-product. Make sure the designer and developer have the same page for the core.

2. Efficient and effective workflow

Previously, the designer needed an extra step for handover because the designer needed to upload the UI design to Zeplin. Currently, we only need to use Figma to do the handover. This will speed up the handover process.

3. Standardize tools

Yes, we are slowly leaving inspectable design tools and sticking with Figma for designing and handovers. Reducing tools will certainly reduce work time.

But there are a few things to note:

• The designers need to create a proper Figma documentation handover to give to developers.
• Developers need to learn to use Figma as a tool for handovers.

Teamwork

So that was is the handover improvement process that we did in Ruangguru. Until now, we are still working together to find the ideal pattern. But at least we have to try to improve this process.

We could say this handover is a process of uniting 2 worlds; the designer’s and the developers’ worlds. When the two can be united, then the results will be extraordinary. In this case, I learned that we are working as a team. We should not think of designers and developers as opposites because this takes understanding from both sides.

Hi, it’s been a long time no see you from my last case study. I just want to say...

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy reading this case study.

Since you made it this far, I’ll introduce myself.

My name is Jufry Heryanta, I’m a Product Designer at Ruangguru (and now I’m acting to be an Interaction Designer).

If you have any feedback or just want to chat with me, drop me a message at [email protected] or connect on LinkedInand Instagram.