handoff Archives

The design handoff is a critical part of any project. For many designers and engineers, the design handoff is a stressful experience. If either team misses something, it could result in product defects and delays.

While it’s primarily the responsibility of the UX team to produce prototypes, assets, and documentation, the design handoff process is a collaborative effort—starting in the early design stages.

There are three stages to a successful design handoff:

During Design (before the handoff)
During Handoff
After Handoff

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What to do at Design Phase to Improve Design Handoff?

A design handoff is not a single event in the design and development of a digital product. Instead, it’s a process that starts during the early design stages and ends after designers have completed the prototype.

Designers and engineers must communicate and collaborate to streamline the design handoff process, mitigating costly errors, design debt, and inconsistencies.

Discovery

During the early stages, designers and engineers should meet to discuss technical constraints concerning design ideas. While innovation is essential to build a competitive advantage, designers must work within the company’s resources and technical requirements.

A development team representative should attend user research to learn the “WHY” behind design decisions. By doing so, developers will better understand the user’s needs and the problems UX designers are trying to solve.

Planning

Including developers in design sprints is another way to align technology and design. Developers can work with designers during sprints to find solutions to user problems that align with technical constraints.

At the same time, developers can begin taking notes to research tools or packages they might need to build new features.

Prototyping

Developers can provide valuable feedback and insights during the prototyping phase—like how designs might look and function across different browsers, devices, and viewports.

Getting developers to sign off on designs and features during the prototyping phase can save a lot of time and heartache for the final design handoff. There’s nothing worse than going “back to the drawing board” because UX teams’ vision doesn’t align with the technical reality!

It’s also helpful for a development team representative to attend late-stage usability testing to visualize how users interact with the final product.

User Interface Design

A well-documented design system is a crucial part of any digital product. Creating a component-based design system allows engineers to code reusable “widgets” to develop the final product efficiently.

Designers and developers can work together to ensure that the design system is consistent and that sizing conventions will translate to code effectively.

Developers can also provide technical specs for asset formats and sizes, so UX teams optimize content for product and web constraints.

How to Structure Better Design Handoff?

If design and development teams communicate and collaborate effectively during the design process, the handoff should be a smooth process of double-checking and organizing.

How designers present a design handoff is as important as the documentation, files, and assets themselves.

Firstly, UX teams should delete unused layers and guides to avoid confusion. Designers must also double-check they have grouped and labeled components correctly.

Using a consistent naming convention (like the BEM notation) will help developers quickly locate files, assets, components, and elements. Engineers might advise on a preferred file structure that aligns with an efficient development workflow.

Explicit annotations are essential for developers to understand mockups and interactive prototypes. These annotations provide context or describe functionality that might be beyond the design tool’s capabilities.

Lastly, designers must walk through the product with the documentation to ensure developers receive a comprehensive design handoff.

Recommended resource: Design Handoff Checklist

How to Improve Collaboration After Design Handoff?

UX teams play a vital role in the implementation’s quality assurance (QA)—testing the final product against interactive prototypes and mockups.

Once the final product is complete, designers and engineers should meet to discuss improving the design handoff process for future products and features.

Design Handoff With UXPin

UXPin automates many mundane tasks to save UX teams valuable time during a design handoff. Unlike other design tools, UXPin requires no plugins or third-party apps to produce handoff documentation and annotations.

UXPin generates design specifications inside the tool, eliminating the need for external documentation while avoiding misunderstandings. Developers can download assets directly from UXPin’s Style Guide—no need to share via cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Design, development, and product teams can collaborate throughout the design handoff process with UXPin’s comments. Team members can tag one another, assign tasks, and choose whether comments are visible to the Team or the Public.

If you want to take design handoff to the next level and get rid of any product drifts – our Merge technology will be just the right fit.

Designers can prototype with fully interactive components that developers build final products with. Thanks to designers and developers using the same components from the same coded design system that are stored in a Git repository or Storybook, they can be on the same page and avoid all the errors that come out in a design handoff process.

See how UXPin Merge works – get rid of product drift and maximize your design systems.

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When you have a very small design team with just a couple of people, you might wonder why anyone needs a DesignOps professional. As your agency grows larger, you start recruiting help from more freelancers, or your products become more complicated, you will quickly realize that DesignOps plays a crucial role in design teams.

If you’re unsure whether you need DesignOps, consider some of the positive roles that design operations professionals can improve in your teams and projects.

DesignOps can build a team of diverse talent

Technology always moves forward, which means that your products will have to adjust to emerging trends quickly. Smartphones are literally everywhere, so it’s easy to forget that the first iPhone didn’t come out until 2013. Think about how much apps have changed within less than a decade! You have no idea what experts you will need on your team a few years from now.

Currently, your team probably needs at least one:

Project manager
Graphic manager
Animation designer
UI/UX designer

More complex projects might require:

Content creators
An art director
A brand manager
Developer

Are you certain that your team has the right members to complete challenging projects? A DesignOps professional can build a team of diverse talent that helps you attract high-profile clients, grow your brand recognition, and increase your revenue.

DesignOps can recruit the talent you need for individual projects

You don’t necessarily need all of those people on your payroll. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, animators earn about $75,270 per year plus benefits. As long as your animator stays busy, it makes sense to pay for a full-time employee. The situation changes when you only need someone to add animations to occasional projects.

When you don’t need a team member consistently, you can outsource tasks to a freelancer. DesignOps can make sure that the chosen freelancers have the right skills and talents for the job. You could hire a random person from a website like Fiverr, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll like the results you get. You can trust DevOps to find the right person for the job.

Trust DesignOps to create great design systems

Your DesignOps professional acts like a coach that develops strategies and communicates plans to the team. Creating a great design system makes communicating project requirements and limitations a little easier.

DesignOps is the right person to create design systems because they communicate with everyone involved in a project, including the client or brand expert. Branding plays a critical role in product development. If your client makes its products more recognizable by using the same icons in every design, your team needs a design system that limits them to those icons. More often than not, DesignOps is the only person talking to the client often enough to know the importance of these decisions.

Give your DesignOps professional control of design systems to streamline the prototyping process and meet the client’s expectations.

DesignOps handles business issues so your team can focus on design

Wouldn’t it be great if your team could design products without worrying about budgets? They could do so many amazing things!

In the real world, every design project comes with countless business tasks like:

Tracking budgets
Logging hours
Responding to emails
Attending client meetings

More likely than not, your product designers don’t have any interest in these things. They’d rather spend their time doing the work they love. Let them focus on design by assigning business tasks to DesignOps. Without the burden of these tasks, your team will work more efficiently and build better products.

You need DesignOps to perfect project management

Your design team needs a system that helps members coordinate their efforts and reach common milestones. That means you need a project management methodology that works well for your team.

Some of the most popular management methodologies for design teams include Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. There are dozens of other options, though, that could make your team more effective.

It’s also possible that your team needs a unique approach to management. Creating your own design process can break down barriers and give your employees the freedom to explore radical ideas that lead to amazing features.

Who decides what project management methodology your teams should follow. Leave that job to DesignOps. They already know a lot about your team members, projects, clients, and processes. It makes sense for them to take responsibility for choosing a management methodology that brings out the best in your team and technologies.

DesignOps finds the technology your team needs to thrive

Your technology stack dictates—at least in part—what your design team can accomplish. You can’t make animations when you don’t have software with animation features. Similarly, you can’t test designs unless you have a tool that lets you interact with your prototypes.

When you search the internet for design tools, you will get dozens of results claiming that they offer the best features. Can you trust those statements? Even writers making best-of lists have partnerships that encourage them to position some design tools over others.

In other words, it’s best to get help from someone who knows how all of these products work. What reputations do they really have? Do they integrate well with other tools? Will other designers laugh when they find out that you use an outdated app? Are there any trends on the market that your team should follow?

DesignOps professionals know the answers to these and countless other questions that you need to answer before you can choose a technology stack. They usually also follow tech novelties that can help optimize the whole product development process.

For example, one of the burning issues in product teams is the disconnect between design and development – the handoff reality check is the moment when some of the design ideas can’t be implemented into production or take much more time than it was predicted.

In such a situation, DesignOps would search for solutions like tools that can help convert the design to code, much more interactive prototyping tools to check the interactivity scenarios before passing the design to development, or even tech that allows designers to create a prototype with already coded components that are production-ready.

The last solution simplifies and shortens the process of product development by making it faster for designers to prototype and for developers to launch the ready product. If you’re interested in that as a DesignOps or any other member of a product team, we have a solution – UXPin Merge. You can create designs with UI React components that are already interactive and easily reusable. It may sound complicated but in reality, there’s no difference between prototyping with standard elements and the revolutionary code-powered components.

Sounds like a perfect solution?

You don’t have to trust our perspective of UXPin Merge. It’s best if you checked on your own how beneficial it may be for you. Designing with code can help you optimize your product development process a lot, so if you’re ready for implementing a revolutionary, yet not so complicated tech, just request access to Merge.