The Design and Development Operations
***The way a designer contributes to a delivery phase determines the quality of an end-product.***
Designers are typically responsible for gathering and structuring business requirements, conducting user research, and creating wireframes. Nevertheless, designers frequently express dissatisfaction with the implementation quality of their designs. This suggests the potential for enhancement in the design and development processes within their organizations.
Here are several key considerations to assess within a team:
→ Ensure proper handoff of design deliverables. This entails creating specifications that serve to developers' needs and maintaining accessible and informative documentation.
→ Evaluate the effectiveness of communication within operations. Specifically, examine how the design and development teams collaborate to address challenges. This factor significantly impacts decision-making processes, the pace at which they distribute information and pass on feedback between disciplines.
→ Continuously monitor outcomes and report areas for improvement.
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I'd like to guide you through the procedures we implemented to facilitate hand-off and maintain a delivery quality within a Scrum/Scale-Up team of 4 devs, 2 designers and 1 product manager that I helped to establish. This process was highly effective for us and resulted in:
→ decreased number of UX/UI audit tasks
→ decreased time spend on a task by developers.
What is more, we met all the deadlines without the need for overtime work.
Note: This paper is about a one stage of digital product development process–delivery phase from
a designer's perspective. A designer who has an ownership over a product. Before delving into the procedures, let's make an assumption that the designs were agreed upon within a multidisciplinary team in the prior stages, and now it's time for a design hand-off.
1. After the ideation process, a designer is responsible for organising and documenting the design work he/she did.
The beginning of a delivery process is about decomposing the designs into chunks, defining frontend tasks and grouping them.
Image 1: Tasks related to a new feature, organised and prioritised.
2. The designer writes frontend Jira tasks with respective Acceptance criteria that define DONE status of the task.
The designer is a person who knows all the design-related details of a project, and can write them down easily. The designer links respective documentation pages, prototypes, Miro boards etc, which developers will find helpful, so all the task-related assets are organised within a Jira ticket.
Image 2: An example of a Jira tasks made by me
2a. The designer should look for related tasks to decide if any task is blocked by another.
Image 3: A diagram illustrating relations between tasks
3. Presenting the tasks to developers – To be on the same page.
During a Grooming session, a designer presents the Jira tickets and all the task-related assets (or at leasts mentions where to find them) to the development team and gathers last feedback before implementation.
Image 4: Me presenting a documentation for a new component.
4. UX/UI audit
Following the execution of a designated task and the completion of a quality assurance (QA) process, it is time for a designer to conduct a final review of the implemented version prior to its release. During this review, the designer may identify and report any UX/UI-related issues, with the expectation that these issues will be addressed and resolved before the final release.
Image 5: UX/UI audit tasks organised and prioritised
Conclusions:
The presented process made the whole team feel like they are working together harmoniously.
It turns out that when a person who knows all the design-related details of a new feature starts to be more involved into and contribute to a delivery process by decomposing the designs into chunks, writing and organising tasks, performing UX/UI audits, the quality of end-product can skyrocket, as well as team's credibility.
