✅ One way to improve designer-developer collaboration (#34)
Happy Thursday!
Yesterday I wrote about introducing proposals to the design systems engineering process. (If you missed it, you can catch up here: https://maecapozzi.com/newsletter/33/).
Kamlesh emailed me yesterday about his team's proposal process and shared the RFCs his team at Razorpay have written to date. Check them out if you need inspiration!
Today, I want to talk about design process.
Like most UI teams, design systems teams sometimes struggle with designer-developer handoff. It's not uncommon for designers to pass off "finished" designs to developers that fail to handle some edge cases, and are missing interaction states, error handling, and variations.
One way a design systems team can improve this process is by introducing a pre-dev checklist. Different design systems will have different requirements for what makes a good design. For example, more mature design systems might need to worry about issues like internationalization and cross-platform adaptation.
Creating a pre-dev checklist is a critical exercise for a few key reasons:
- It encourages designers and developers to work together to agree on what designers should hand off to devs
- It creates a place where team members can add additional requirements as the system matures over time
- It improves the quality, usability, and accessibility of design
If you don't have one already, take the time to work together as a team to create a pre-dev checklist. Adobe has a great one that you can refer to as an example.
Reply to this email if you have a pre-dev checklist you'd be willing to share with other newsletter subscribers!
I'm trying something new today! I've been seeing some job opportunities around the web, so I'm going to start linking them in my newsletters. Feel free to send me job descriptions you come across as well (you can DM me on Twitter @MCapoz or email me at mae@maecapozzi.com).
Design System Job Opportunities
Design
Talk soon,
Mae