Engineers are the magicians of the crew, who, with a few taps of their fingers, take the plans and the pixels and Voila! A working implementation. As a designer, how do you best keep up with their meme-savvy, self-deprecating, script-loving ways?
Engineers are the translators of ideas into reality
They are the builders of the foundations, keepers of everything that makes your product tick, and they make it work fast.
- Generally, it’s the engineers who innovate, who push technology forward with new algorithms, and who make sense of the trillions of inputs available and turn those into some semblance of meaning.
Want to make stuff happen? All you need to do is just convince one or two engineers
Start with the basic building blocks-an idea, a design, and an implementation
- Be tight with an engineer
- Ask them to spend 5 minutes fixing something
- Watch them submit the diff
Work extremely closely with the engineer
Sit right next to them and ensure everyone is on the same page
- If something wasn’t implemented correctly, do something about it
- You, the designer, own the product that goes out to users, not the Photoshop mock on your computer
It’s easier if the engineer you’re working with appreciates good design
You can help every engineer you work with develop an appreciation for good design by teaching them about your values and why you think the design you propose is worth building.
- The more excited an engineer is about a design, the quicker it’ll be implemented.
Be complete with your designs
Make sure your design solutions are complete and consider edge cases
- Internationalization
- Error states
- User extremes
- Transitions
- Not only does this inspire confidence that you’ve thought through everything holistically, but they help engineers plan out how to architect the system and give proper estimates for how long things will take
Understand engineering constraints early
The worst thing that can happen is that you spend your time perfecting a design that has no chance of working out
- Good designers are scarce enough as is
- So the next time a brilliant idea possesses you but you have a sneaking suspicion that it might be hard to build, don’t wonder. Ask the engineer
Help engineers understand how final the design is at any given stage
If you give an engineer a design to build but you’re not confident how well it’ll work out until you get to play with the implementation, make sure you let them know that there’s a good chance things will change.
