Well-designed products emerge when product teams play nice and collaborate on an even playing field with ease. An overcomplicated design-to-dev handoff process is a barrier to that.
CollabSoft recommends a simpler approach to handing over designs: the Clear View Method.
The Clear View Method emphasizes the need for product teams to have a clear view of everything they need to successfully deliver a design. The goal? To make the design handoff process quicker and easier while still ensuring that the final build is exactly what designers intend.
Developers and designers should work together to create a design system containing design principles, component and pattern libraries, and visual language. This should be documented in a team workspace tool that everyone has easy access to, like Confluence, not in a design tool that only the designers really know how to use.
A band can’t play music if only one of the members knows what you’re playing. It’s good practice for designers to have regular meetings and check-ins with the whole team before, during, and after handoff. This includes developers, product owners, support people, and marketing and sales teams. This helps make sure the feature is continuing to solve the right problems and meet the needs of the user story.
Your designers and developers are probably working in a work management tool like Jira. This is where design handoff should take place. Don’t make handoffs happen in your design tool. Devs don’t want to be in the design tool any more than designers want to be in their coding tools. Some companies will add a further tool to the mix, like Zeplin, to act as a bridge between design and dev. But your work management tool is already perfectly placed to be that bridge.
A design that keeps changing in a design handoff document can lead to scope creep and rework that derails timelines and disrupts the allocation of resources. Handing over a final design that’s “locked for editing” provides developers with stable requirements. This helps minimize rework, respects developer workflows, facilitates QA and testing, and maintains the integrity of your design handoff document.
The moment the developer receives the design handoff document is a great time for them to ask questions or raise concerns about a design. Interacting on the design handoff document itself is perfect for this. It can help product owners track development progress and reinforce your work management tool as the single source of truth for the life cycle of the feature.
“Locked in” doesn’t mean “no going back”. Flexible rigidity means not being too rigid or too flexible about handing over a final design. A design shouldn’t keep changing while a dev is trying to work on it, nor should a designer be prevented from making necessary changes after a design is finalized. A good practice is to lock in a design, discuss it, gather feedback, and work on a new version—which you then lock in again.
