Early insights: what do designers want from developers?

Designers and developers working together is basically a buddy cop movie—they clash, things explode, and by the end they realize they’re on the same side. The problem is that designers and devs don’t want their relationship to be this dramatic.

What can be done to get them collaborating better? CollabSoft recently conducted a survey of 500 designers to find out.

A full report is coming soon, but we wanted to share some early insights on how designers like to work with devs.

Designers and developers should learn how to do each other’s job

One of the reasons we're conducting this research is because Figma ran a similar survey of 200 front-end developers in 2023. In it, a massive 91% of developers said that designers should know how to code.

We wanted to know if designers felt the same… and they do! They just don’t feel as strongly as the devs do, with 68% of respondents to our survey thinking designers should know how to code.

But it goes both ways.

We also asked designers if developers should learn how to design, and 67% said yes.

Learning each other’s job is the main thing that can improve collaboration

We asked what could improve designer-developer collaboration and the most popular answer (38%) was that devs should learn to design and designers should learn to code.

But designers are clearly more divided on this question. 28% said devs getting involved in the design process earlier could improve collaboration. And 20% said more meetings could solve the problem.

Siloed tooling isn’t a problem… or is it?

Only 13% of designers said that bridging the gap between tools could improve designer-developer collaboration.

We also asked what the #1 frustration of collaborating with developers was, and only 20% of designers said it was siloed tooling, with 45% citing different objectives as the main cause of tension.

At the same time, most designers (48%) wish their devs worked in Figma dev mode, which means they do see different tooling as a problem, and think the solution is getting devs to come into the design tool.

Also, 42% say their devs are already working in Figma dev mode, which could explain why a lot of respondents don’t see siloed tooling as a problem—because the devs have broken that silo by adopting Figma!

Full report coming soon

Those are just a few preliminary highlights. We’ll publish the full report soon.

In the meantime, we’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who took the time to participate in our survey. We were overwhelmed by the amount of responses. Clearly designer-developer collaboration is a hot topic right now.

If you're interested in the full report, please follow us on LinkedIn where we share insights and advice on designer-developer collaboration.

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