Integrating Design and Development teams by implementing a Design System
2:20pm - 2:50pm on Saturday, October 3 in OnlineMariana Bedran Lesche, Daniela Falcone
- Watch:
- https://youtu.be/afC6RhfyqP4
Description
Abstract
In the software industry, developers, designers and stakeholders should be working together to achieve the same goals and deliver high quality products to the final users. To be actually able to work together in an efficient and harmonic way, though, is a whole other thing. In a team composed by developers and designers, we were able to mitigate the impact of communication flaws and concepts divergences in a continuous effort to cover the blind spots we found on every iteration we went through. In this talk we’re going to share some lessons learned about how to integrate both teams’ work with a solid management process.
Argument
To deliver a product that involves design - from research to screens and usability - and its implementation by a development team can be a big challenge for all parts involved. If we aim to really address users needs and deliver high quality products and meaningful experiences, it’s important to have a team aligned and fully integrated.
The interaction between stakeholders, designers and developers normally involve a lot of friction and divergence of concepts and vocabulary. The back and forth between development and QA normally take a lot of time and effort till things get quite right. Besides, people from different backgrounds tend to have diverging perspectives about the value and the challenges of implementing an interface. Developers get frustrated when faced with a non negotiable design, seemingly impossible to implement, while designers can be angry seeing their conceptions poorly executed and stakeholders impatient with a product that never gets done.
These problems can be mitigated by a solid management process and a conscious effort to create a common ground for communication. Following a path in the direction of the implementation of a Design System can be a powerful tool to achieve that.
In this talk we’re going to share the results of the gradual improvements adopted by our team in an effort to make these interactions smoother and to deliver a product with higher quality standards and more aggregated value to our client. We’ll explain how the processes we introduced to our interactions were able to impact our productivity while improving the team’s and the project’s health.