Perhaps you remember a post I made a few months ago, discussing some of the ways that Progress was talking to designers and developers about the handoff and how they collaborate. That included some in-person conversations, events at conferences, and – last but certainly not least – a survey.
Well, the results from the survey are in and I’m super excited to share them! If you’ve ever been curious about designer / developer communication, pain points, design system usage, and so much more, then you’ll definitely want to check this out.
Of course, I can’t say all that without offering up a little teaser, right? So here are my personal top 3 favorite tidbits from the survey results report:
3. Designers AND developers both think collaboration is smoother when they understand technical aspects of each other’s job.
We asked participants what they thought made for a smooth relationship between designers and developers, and the top three answers were:
- Developers are involved in the process earlier.
- Designers understood development technical constraints.
- Developers knew more about design principles.
We already knew, from those earlier conversations, that devs wanted to be looped in earlier – but it was super interesting to see that both designers and developers thought they could stand to brush up on their knowledge of “the other side” a little bit. So, if you’re a designer, maybe it’s time to read up on some CSS syntax…and if you’re a dev, maybe it’s time to dig into a little color theory. Hey, it couldn’t hurt, right?
2. Half of all respondents have a design system.
32% have an established and maintained design system, while 20% have one that they’ve created recently and are working on building up. Additionally, another 10% have plans to build one in the future, but haven’t gotten started yet. If you were waiting to see if this whole “design system” thing would really catch on before investing the time…I think it’s safe to say that it has.
3. Only 26% are truly happy with the way design gets implemented in the final product.
Not gonna lie – this one kinda hurt to read. When asked if folks were happy with the way a design was ultimately translated into a functional website / application, only about 1 in 4 were. The remainder were split evenly between “Eh, it’s passable” and “Nope, not even close”. All things considered…not a glowing review.
See the rest of the results
You can see the answers to all the questions on our results webpage, but make sure you download the full report to get all the extra data analysis and interesting cross-sections. We think there’s a lot to learn, and it’s packed with helpful tips for improving the collaborative process at your workplace.
Also, if you took the survey: thank you so much! We really enjoyed going through all the responses and seeing what everyone had to say. Keep an eye out for next year’s survey, and – until then – keep creating awesome stuff.
Top comments (1)
My quick takeaway here is that to reduce the amount of negotiation and departure from the intended design, the three keys to collaboration would also increase happiness with the final results: