3 ways designers can improve working with engineers

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The importance of design in the tech industry has grown over the last few years, along with a greater appreciation for designers who know how to work within development constraints. We produce our best work when our designers and engineers work in a harmonious, cross-collaborative environment.

Over the last 8 years, we’ve learned a lot about working together. Here are three key takeaways that will help designers improve their relationship with engineers.

1) Be more pragmatic with decision-making

You need a solid understanding of what is feasible to build within the scope of your product. The best starting point is to digest your platform’s guidelines and standards (here you go: iOS, macOS, watchOS, material design, and web design).

Be able to see how each component will be built from an engineer’s perspective. Start to learn a programming language. Don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea that you need to know how to build a product from scratch, but any amount of knowledge that comes from knowing how to code will help you make more informed design decisions and will also help you better communicate with engineers.

Design for the best user experience first, then add the whimsy and fun after. Remember, basic UX principles should guide your design from the beginning. There has to be a balance between the amount of effort required to build a feature and the benefit of the result.

2) Make the engineer’s job as easy as possible

Provide your engineers with clean, well-organized design files that have comps and layers plainly named. Cut assets yourself and name them appropriately for the given platform. I know, this isn’t the most fun job. But it ensures that what goes into the finished product is exactly what you want. It also takes the work away from your engineers, which means they can dedicate more time to building better features.

Make sure your designs are consistent. Run audits over your work at different points in the design process. It’s better to check yourself a million times, than to block an engineer from developing down the road because there are differences in the treatment of similar elements.

Make annotated documents when necessary. You can create your own, or utilize one of many tools such as Red Pen, UX Pin, and Notebook for Sketch. Living and static style guides can aid in the cohesion of development for your product. Keep in mind that some developers never look at the style guide and work straight off a comp, so make sure to communicate early in the process with your engineering team. Spend your time wisely and efficiently.

Prototypes and interaction animations show engineers how something should work in the most straightforward way possible. Some of our favorite tools that offer different levels of control are Keynote, After Effects, Invision, Flinto, and Pixate. If you rely on word-of-mouth to get your point across, you leave a lot of room for misinterpretation and increase chances of the final product misaligning with your vision.

3) Communicate constantly and respect the engineer’s opinions

Don’t silo yourself (or the engineer) off by only talking when it’s time to hand off designs. When you work together from the beginning, you are more powerful and will ultimately create a better product.

If you are unsure about a feature’s design, how a transition will work, or the flow of a user’s interactions, consult with your engineering team. They have a wealth of knowledge and can approach your problem from an analytical, technical perspective. Don’t be shy to admit you need advice.

These three lessons boil down to empathy, organization, and communication. The key with all of these is to make sure you are in control of the execution of the final product. You want your vision to be realized, right? So do everything you can to equip your engineers with the right materials and knowledge, so they can execute your vision perfectly and you end up with a kickass product.

 

[– This article was originally posted on the Tendigi blog, republished with permission from the author –]

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Free download: Comprehensive stationery mockup

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If you’re building a brand for a client, you’ll sell the pitch far more effectively if you can deliver not just flat design concepts, but detailed mockups too. To give you a boost in the right direction we have this comprehensive stationery mockup, designed for use with Photoshop CS4+, by Qeaql.com.

The whole set, which is photo-realistic, yet minimal, is designed using smart objects, so you can add your own artwork simply by double-clicking any of the smart object layers in Photoshop and pasting your artwork in. Some items in the design feature artwork areas for you to add your own graphics—the open brochure for example—others are simply adjustable by color—like the ball of twine. And of course, because the file is sorted into carefully labelled layers, you can toggle off any that you don’t need.

Amongst the most useful are the envelopes, letterhead paper, and the devices; you’ll also find more unusual branding items, like a vinyl record sleeve and a rubber stamp. Whichever you choose, mixing and matching to show off your brand concept in its best light, couldn’t be simpler.

And best of all, the file is free to all WebdesignerDepot readers, for personal and commercial use. Download the file beneath the preview:

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UX Design in action, experts weigh in

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The concept of the user experience is often broken down into two areas: theory and practice. They’re not the same thing because what may work in theory obviously doesn’t always work in practice, and this is where many designers and brands sometimes run into problems with their design processes. If only there was more direct insight into what actually works and doesn’t work when designing and developing products…

UXPin’s latest guide on Design in Action delves into this topic and reveals some very interesting answers that designers can implement today in their own workflows. Featuring hours and hours of firsthand interviews with some of the top designers at influential companies, UXPin’s analysis gets to the bottom of practical methods that work at successful companies.

Design for enterprise doesn’t have to be clunky

There’s a misconception among some designers and developers that enterprise (software) design has to be characterized by bad communication or excessive documentation or a combination of both. UXPin talked to Autodesk’s Tel Aviv team to come away with some revelations that say the contrary.
Its team found that, if it applied the following, its UX design process was more efficient and wieldy when:

• feature requests were validated with qualitative research (user interviews and support-ticket data) and quantitative research (in surveys and analytics tools) early on in the design process;
• time was set aside early on in the process for discovery and idea brainstorming by way of half- and full-day workshops;
• documentation was seen as a way to find information instead of just a paper trail;
• prototyping for the hardest interaction models was prioritized.

Structured design isn’t everything

While some designers may put a lot of faith into structured design, it’s not appropriate for businesses of all sizes. Take startups, for instance: UXPin found that structured design doesn’t allow startups the flexibility they need to succeed in their design processes.

Based on interviews with Slack’s team, UXPin’s guide reveals that concept exploration should be defined by flexible procedures; in that environment, more structured development isn’t a hindrance and can in fact result in successful product development (though testing and research always have to validate progress).

Here are important takeaways from interviews with Slack’s team:

• product briefs mustn’t hint at solutions, instead, suggestions for different strategies should be the focus;
• after the UX design process has started, teams should be allowed to analyze concepts and determine constraints;
• pair design (two designers working together with one as the leader) usually offers more efficient problem solving and richer idea brainstorming.

Agile UX and creative design can coexist

Fast timelines and retaining creative integrity sometimes don’t always go together in the UX design process. Based on interviews with Kaplan Test Prep, however, we see that that’s not always the case.

Consistent user validation, group brainstorming and scalable design sprints are key to hit fast timelines while still promoting creative integrity within design.

Interviews with Kaplan’s design team discovered that:

• product ideas ought to be explored with ideation and user research working parallel to each other and then converging to establish design requirements
• documentation should only be guidance, but certain flexibility should remain to ensure creative freedom
• to test ideas more efficiently on a smaller scale, mobile-first product design is vital

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Deal: Save 98% on this colossal font bundle

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If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a hundred times: you can’t have too many fonts.

Different typefaces are like the voices with which an actor speaks; they give you the power of expression, allowing you to invest the content of designs with emotion, mood, and personality.

So we know you’re just going to love this colossal deal from our sister-site MightyDeals.com: Grab 30, high-quality fonts, worth $1349, for just $29. Yeah, that’s not a typo, grab this incredible deal and save yourself $1320! Or, for just $14 more, purchase both the desktop and web font versions.

If a 98% discount isn’t enough to tempt you, a glance through the awesome designs on offer will. There are wonderful script faces included, ranging from the elegant to the assertive, from professional and restrained, to full-on and excited.

Extra weights are packed in. There are amazing OpenType features, like ligatures, swashes, and alternate characters. You’ll even find some cool bonus files with textures and backgrounds included in the download.

What’s more, this set of 30 fonts comes with an extended license which means you can install them on multiple machines that you own, and not only that, but you can resell any flattened artwork you produce.

Jump over to MightyDeals to grab this extraordinary deal today!

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Design with data using Invision’s brand new plugin

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Craft is InVision’s suite of screen-design tools that lets designers easily add content with a click. Two things designers value in their workflows—speed and data—are efficiently brought into their projects thanks to Craft.

Now, Invision is debuting Data within Craft; Data is a free plugin that lets designers pull things like text, images and JSON values out of public API sites live, and add them directly into Sketch.

Previously, designers could only pull in text and images from places like Dropbox, their local files, websites, Unsplash and from built-in data. Thanks to the JSON tab, creatives can now enter URLs or drop in JSON files to assign values to design elements. After this, they can utilize the duplicate plugin to create unique design components with only a click—each one featuring new data from their API.

If you have already been using Craft you’ll find significant changes in the interface, thanks to Data. For one thing, the “type” and “photos” plugins have now been consolidated within Data, thereby simplifying the menu so that you’ll find all of the images and text that you pull in one, well-organized location.

Grabbing images and text from live sites has never been more streamlined, as it happens in the same menu. Simply click on a photo to fill anything with an image; you can also do the same with text. As with the other data tools, when you duplicate this content, Data will let you pull more content from the same webpage.

Draft centers around three “modes” that speed up workflows:

• Custom: This tab lets you fill your design with customized photos and text with only a few clicks. To drop in random user names, for instance, simply choose a few bits of text and then click “Names”. This process is the same with the rest of the categories (Cities, Headlines, Currency, etc.).
• Web: This tab lets you pull in photos and text from any site that’s desirable. Just as with the Custom tab, simply pick a block of text or the image and then click the text or image on the site itself.
• JSON: This tab allows you to plug in APIs to access and then design with any kind of data you choose. This feature is ideal if you want to design with either public data from an external source or your own API data.

Learn more about the Craft Data plugin here.

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Are you solving the wrong problems?

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If you’re a web professional, there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself spending at least some time on the wrong problems. Maybe you were asked to implement a useless feature. Maybe you’ve ended up spending too much time on something because it was difficult, rather than important.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll define the wrong problems as ones whose solutions will help neither the business nor the customer, while wasting time and money in the process. We’ll examine why this happens, and find specific ways to avoid it.

Issue 1: Impressing the wrong people

A common problem occurs when web professionals are encouraged to impress their clients, their managers, their organization, or an awards committee, instead of the actual users of their sites. The result is often a site that excites the company, but confuses the customers. A common symptom of this problem is when a site has complex visual effects, but the users have to struggle to find the basic information they’re looking for.

This problem can happen for a number of reasons including pressure, misaligned incentives, attachment to an idea, or a lack of communication.

Leaders can help avoid misaligned incentives by setting a tone of: Don’t try to dazzle me; just make our customers’ lives easier.

The solution is to keep the focus on the user. Whether you’re creating a site or you’re paying for one, that means always asking how decisions will affect the user. Is everything on the site clear? Can people find what they’re looking for? Do any of your choices get in your customers’ way?

If you’re still having trouble getting your clients or your organization to listen, make sure you’re showing the business value of your comments. For example, “If we take out that bulky file, the page will load faster, which means more people will stay on it, and profits will go up by $X.” If that doesn’t work, there might be a bigger organizational problem that won’t be solved with user experience questions. Leaders can help avoid misaligned incentives by making sure to set a tone of: Don’t try to dazzle me; just make our customers’ lives easier.

Issue 2: Chasing a doomed solution instead of fixing the real problem

Sometimes, web developers will find themselves laboring over a solution that is time-consuming, expensive, or fundamentally flawed when something simple would have worked much better.

For example, let’s say the client asks for site search functionality. It’s easy to dive into specifics. Where do they want the search bar? What’s the deadline? How do they want the results page to look? What should the URL structure be?

The question no one asked was “Why?”

In this totally hypothetical story, the client didn’t need search at all. They weren’t a major retailer or a reference site, and the real issue was that customers couldn’t find what they were looking for. A few simple tweaks to the home page navigation would have solved the problem, but instead, the company ended up building a site search that ultimately didn’t solve the customers’ confusion.

How do you avoid this?

The best approach is to keep asking about the underlying problems instead of getting too deep into the idea of one solution. For example, instead of diving into building a site search, ask why it is needed. If you keep asking why, you’ll eventually uncover the real problem, which will be something like “Customers can’t find what they’re looking for.”

If everyone understands the true problems and goals, you’ll end up with solutions that are less costly, less time-consuming, and more effective.

Issue 3: Spending time according to difficulty instead of importance

If you’ve been involved in a web project, you might have experienced a situation where too much time was spent on something that wasn’t really important. Difficult things can take longer, but difficulty is often not correlated with importance.

For example, I once saw a situation where a ton of time was almost spent on a complex, barely visible background animation that was useless at best, and distracting at worst. This animation was also going to be buried way at the bottom of the page.

The distracting animation was there was because someone in the company…wanted to feel dazzled

It would have been easy to spend lots time on this footer background effect while neglecting the important parts of the page. Fortunately, a meeting revealed that the real reason the distracting animation was there was because someone in the company, at the last minute, wanted to feel dazzled. When it became clear that this was a vanity project and not something that would help the users, the animation became de-prioritized.

How do you avoid spending too much time on difficult, but unimportant things?

1. Before you start a website, make sure you understand its most important goals. That understanding can help prevent you from going too deep into a section or feature that doesn’t provide a significant benefit. If you need to ask someone, do that too!
2. If you find yourself spending too much time on something that isn’t important, step back and reevaluate the priorities. Does the company really need this feature? Will it help the users? Is there an acceptable shortcut that will have the same effect? Questions like these can free up more of your time so you can work on the stuff that matters. That’s best for the business, the users, and you.

Issue 4: Not having enough information to make the right decisions

As a developer or designer, sometimes you might not hear all of the business reasons for a particular decision. As a client or manager, you might not hear all of the technical or user experience information you need to make a judgment call. A lack of information can lead to decisions that waste time, money, and customer attention.

One way to fix a lack of information is to be vocal (in a friendly way) when you see an issue.

For example, if a certain course of action will destroy the user experience in a way that will stop people from buying, you might want to mention that. Oftentimes, you’ll find that everyone was too focused on something else to see the issue. If you’re a client or a manager, it’s good to let everyone know the business reasons for various decisions, so that everyone involved can produce the best solutions.

Issue 5: Letting ideas mutate from person to person

There’s a children’s game called Telephone, or Chinese Whispers, where everyone stands in a line. Starting at one end, each person whispers a message to the next, with the goal of preserving the original message. By the end, the message is often drastically different.

This scenario is funny as a game, but it’s not so funny when this happens in professional communication. It’s all too common for a good idea to go through several layers of misunderstanding, until the version that gets communicated to the key stakeholder sounds ridiculous.

It’s all too common for a good idea to go through several layers of misunderstanding, until the version that gets communicated…sounds ridiculous

Sometimes, this scenario results in an entire web project based on a misunderstood version of the original idea. To be clear, I’m not saying it’s bad when ideas change. I’m saying it’s a problem when ideas change due to misunderstandings rather than intentional feedback and growth.

Here are some suggestions for how to avoid mutating ideas:

1. Distill the message into its simplest form. Focus on the main intent, and remove as many extraneous details as possible; people have enough to think about already.
2. When necessary, communicate an idea directly to the people who need to hear it. To be clear, this does not mean you should CC the whole office, or alarm the CEO with every stray thought. It simply means that if you have something important to say, don’t just casually mention it to the person next to you and hope it gets around.
3. Put your message in writing whenever possible. That way, you have more time to think about it, and there’s a clear record that anyone can refer to if needed.

Conclusion

Web professionals can end up solving the wrong problems for a variety of reasons, many of which are not entirely in their control. While the suggestions in this article won’t solve everything, I hope they will give you a framework for approaching the things you work on. As long as you focus on the user, avoid being misled by surface solutions, and communicate openly, you have a much better shot of solving the right problems.

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Adobe reveal major Creative Cloud update

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Adobe has just released a major update to its Creative Cloud apps. Updates have been made to Adobe Stock, and Creative Sync, meaning that almost every application in the ecosystem is affected.

The updates include additions to Adobe’s flagship Photoshop application, as well as further enhancements to Adobe Stock. However this is not the anticipated “CC 2016” update, but is (rather strangely, given that we’re half way through 2016) being referred to as “CC 2015.5” in the case of Photoshop, and “CC 2015.3” in the case of Illustrator.

Performance enhancements

There is thankfully a substantial performance enhancement in the latest iteration of the Creative Cloud apps. Recent MacOS updates seemed to have adversely affected Photoshop in particular, so the speed boost is a welcome, and much needed improvement.

Photoshop still doesn’t run at the speed of Affinity Photo, but it does feature far more tools, and it is closing the performance gap incrementally. Illustrator also appears to be faster, although Illustrator’s speed hadn’t been as much of an issue as Photoshop’s.

Adobe XD still in preview

Adobe XD is still in preview, which means you can still download it for free, even without a Creative Cloud membership.

Happily, it is now available in German, French, and Japanese. (Spanish is expected to follow shortly.)

Photoshop CC 2015.5

Several new features have made it into Photoshop. However they’re largely of the “cool trick” variety, rather than the “must have” kind.

The content-aware crop feature has been introduced to enable resizing of canvases without the dreaded checkerboard appearing. It’s particularly useful when rotating images; simple geometry means that rotating a rectangle and then cropping to a square will reduce the overall size of the image. The content-aware crop tool fills in the empty space similarly to the clone stamp tool, so that the image doesn’t have to be cropped smaller. It works extremely well for images with a lot of sky, or less detail; less well if there’s a strong combination of pixels in the adjacent area, as it tends to create a noticeable pattern. As with any tool, use when appropriate.

Content-aware crop in Photoshop 2015.5

There is a new face-aware liquify tool in Photoshop, which is ideal for dropping a few pounds in your latest selfie. It functions just like the liquify tool except that it recognizes facial features, and preserves them, so that a thinner face doesn’t look squished. This was made for whoever runs the Kardashian social media accounts.

Possibly the most useful addition is the match font feature which scans images for typefaces, then suggests possible matches on your local machine or via Adobe Typekit. It’s a great way of faking an extensive knowledge of typefaces, and it’s a surprisingly accurate matchmaker.

Face-aware liquify in Photoshop 2015.5

Illustrator CC 2015.3

Illustrator now features a fast export of assets, so you can output for numerous devices simultaneously. It’s an excellent addition, given that almost any asset you need that isn’t SVG will have to be served in a variety of sizes and densities.

Even more usefully, you can now export an entire set of artboards to multiple formats in a single pass, allowing you to maintain entire icon sets with a single icon per artboard.

Live Shapes have also been improved, so that their corner controls are hidden at smaller sizes; less zooming in and out to adjust sizes in future.

Creative Cloud Libraries permissions

A major boon for anyone managing large sets of assets across organizations, Creative Cloud Libraries now feature control permissions, so you can grant “read only” access to your developers for branding files, while giving your design team full access. And because it’s powered by CreativeSync, any changes the design team makes will sync to the developers’ files.

And for those managing really really large sets of assets, the Creative Cloud Libraries panel now features search filters, to help you track down that illusive icon you designed last March.

Improved CC Libraries panel in InDesign CC

Deeper integration with Adobe Stock

The major additions to this version of Adobe Stock center around closer integration and a one-click licensing system to allow you to license stock images directly on your artboard.

Adobe’s mission is to streamline workflow, allowing designers to search for, and license images from their growing library, more easily. Not a revolutionary concept given that Adobe make money from their stock offering, naturally they want to make purchasing simpler. Is this a benefit to designers? Well, if you’re using Adobe Stock anyway (and Adobe Stock carries one of the better ranges of stock images) then it will make finding and licensing easier. If you’re not already using Adobe Stock, then…meh.

For those hoping to contribute to Adobe Stock, you will shortly be able to submit shots from various applications, including Photoshop and Lightroom.

Adobe Stock Premium

In a further addition to their stock offering Adobe have announced Adobe Stock Premium, which is Adobe Stock, only more expensive. Adobe claim that this new range of 100,000 specially selected images “meet the standards of top advertising agencies and digital and print publications”. Suggesting perhaps that their standard stock images do not.

Premium Collection images, genuinely do look very good. But they don’t have the same streamlined workflow. More importantly they are not covered by your existing Adobe Stock subscription and they aren’t cheap: Images are priced individually, many exceeding $500.

Adobe Stock Premium images

Should you download it?

These are welcome additions to Creative Cloud for designers who are already making use of Adobe’s software. The streamlined workflow, the bug fixes, and a few little tweaks here and there make for a much improved work experience. What is gratifying is that Adobe do appear to be spending as much time fixes existing problems, as they are working on new features. Creative Cloud customers will want to update ASAP—and you can, right now, via the Creative Cloud app.

If you prefer to work with software from one of Adobe’s competitors then this is another update that’s unlikely to win you over; if you don’t already subscribe to Adobe Stock, closer integration with Photoshop is entirely moot.

If you’re sat on the fence, then now may be time to trial Creative Cloud. It is still the industry standard, and the improved performance across the board goes a long way to maintaining that coveted status.

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