A critical part of our development cycle is Design Review. This is often our first look at a design or workflow and where we should begin thinking critically about implementation details. It’s our responsibility to fully understand the design and ask any clarifying questions of the design team. There may be things about the design that make it challenging (or in extreme cases impossible) to implement as proposed. While this can be a challenging discussion at times, it is important to remember that Design is our partner and we are only a good partner if we are prepared to have these candid conversations.
Issues during Design Handoff
- Recognizing which parts of a design will be challenging to implement as early as possible during Design Review cycle.
- Assumptions by members of both teams leading to misunderstandings between a design and its implementation.
- Designs cannot reasonably cover every possible state of a responsive UI.
- Less experienced Front End team members don't know what types of questions to ask until they are implementing the design.
Design Handoff best practices
- Vocalize any assumptions about how an implementation should function.
- Find patterns during collaboration and apply them in the future.
- Look for areas of a design that fall outside normal patterns and start a dialogue on how it will work in practice.
- Continue collaborating with the design team during the lifespan of the project.
- When responsiveness is straightforward, FE team members can use it as an opportunity to hone design skills by implementing their own decisions.
How we can overcome Design Handoff challenges
- By turning designs into componenents, the amount of unknowns during future Design Handoffs is reduced.
- When edge cases occur, using methods like blog posts to share resolutions with the rest of the team to prevent rework.