The other day I was watching a presentation on SlideShare about how the UX designers can work with Developers without getting into conflicts. All my career like many Software Engineers I have had to interact closely with UX designers …the problem mostly stems from the fact that the tools used by both the groups are different as well as the frameworks and languages to achieve the end result . There is some overlap between the two with Javascript / JQuery – however, depending on whether the Client Script impacts the UX interaction or some server related activity , the designer or the developer takes over the definition of the code. A synergy needs to be created between both of them because at the end of the day the UI that we see is the combined effort of these two groups.

The tools and frameworks themselves don’t offer much in terms of creating that collaboration and synergy – however as part of the process , the groups need to mingle and work side by side. Designers do need to understand how the developers incorporate their code into the designs- and developers need to understand to a certain extent the working of Styles and HTML .

Just recently I went through two ASP.Net MVC projects and we used the help of a UX team to put together our styles and layouts. As usual, the mock ups were created which the developers used to incorporate their code into, to achieve the end user requirement of the UI.   There were issues with how the developers had used the mock ups with their code , as expected. Most times the designer would call me and say hey I need to be able to run the web page in development like the developers do, so when I make a change I see it and go through iterations. I made a decision that she needs to get familiar with running the solution in Visual Studio 2010. This helped a lot – saved us precious time by the designer not having to ask the developers to make a fix and publish it on the dev server. The designer at the same time was happy having the independence to make the change in the final UI and seeing the page in debug mode.

One of the other bad practices I noticed with a recent client is that the UX designers would put their wire frames either in Dropbox or zip them up and email the development team. The development team had to always download them and copy one by one in their project. There was no version history , no way to tell what changed other than looking at the rendered page . This can become a development nightmare in a very UI centric project.

All mock ups and styles should be version controlled , preferably in a similar version control system as being used by Developers. This makes it easy for Developers to compare the changes as well as Share the styles if it makes sense into their project from the styles folder of the Designer team in Source control .

I am not sure in the future how much will be offered by Development tool makers in terms of both Developers and Designers being able to use the same tool to do their jobs. However I think if Designers and Developers both understand to a certain extent each other’s code , work side by side and follow good version control practices,  the UI development would be much less of a hassle. The Designers need to understand the interweaving of Server side code with Client side code and the Developers need to understand Javascript , CSS and HTML standards to a reasonable extent.

So there need not be any love lost between Designers and Developers – collaboration and communication can surely bridge the gap.