A perfect company’s website is the outcome of a successful collaboration between two major participants, user experience (UX) designers and web developers. Both participants should understand each other’s well as they couldn’t a well-designed and functional website by their own. Web developers can’t get designs or prototypes to test and access user’s experience without the excreted efforts by UX designers.
On the other hand, UX designers can’t convert their designs into a functional website without web developers. For a valuable and effective website, collaboration is a must. There are two distinct departments for UX designing and web development in companies especially those with larger brands. But small companies may have only one department for both of them. Regardless having one department or two distinct departments for both teams, they will share the same tasks that require their collaboration.
The difference between UX designers and web developers
While UX designers are user-oriented which mean that they focus on the end user interaction with their design, web developers are technically and functionally oriented which mean they focus on the proper work of the website. So, every team has to carry on some actions to achieve their rule efficiently.
UX Designers
They study expected users’ needs and problems in addition to the company’s products that are intended to meet users’ needs and solve their problems, then they transform this information into an appealing design that is easy for customers to use by giving them access to offered products.
Web developers
They are ordered to make sure that the website will function as it is intended to do. So, they take the responsibility of using different technologies such as establishing a database and using programing languages like HTML or JavaScript to bring the website into its live form. Another rule of web developer is to apply search engine optimization (SEO) on the website to make sure that it will rank in google to reach more targeted users. So, the content and stricter of the developed website should match the main purpose of it.
How to develop better engagement between UX designers and web developers
Open communication
Each team of UX designers and web developers have their own separate skills, talents, experience and strengths. If they used their capabilities separately, there should be missed information. Working according to personal preference without communicating with the other team may hinder them from doing their rules properly because the other team may have constraints to discuss such as budget constraints. So, an open door should be maintained between UX designers and web developers to have effective talks and discussions to reach an overall understanding of the project and to know how to implement tasks in a way that helps with the other team rule. For example, UX designers may have something to implement as they think that it would be perfect for the website, but after communication with web developers, they would find that the available abilities are not enough to achieve their thoughts, so changes would be made to reach a reasonable agreement.
Attending meetings
When the owner of the company makes meetings regarding the creation of the website, both UX designers and web developers are recommended to attend these meetings to listen together to the owner during talking about the available budget, the desired website layout, the intended website brand and the overall goals of the project. Both teams will discuss with the owner what will work for his project and what will not work to reach a final agreement that ensures consistency.
Discussing deliverables together
The website owner doesn’t only wait to receive the final outcome from the work of UX designers and web developers, he receives many deliverables from UX designers to be reviewed and to send feedbacks by which UX designers will make changes accordingly. These changes should be discussed with web developers to keep up with updates and to ensure being on the same track.
To be open minded
UX designers should be flexible and ready to receive suggestions and ideas from web developers even if they were still in the design stage as the later team may see things differently. Be involving web developers’ suggestions, UX designers may find that they have included elements that shouldn’t be included or ignored elements that shouldn’t be ignored. This discussion will save time by allowing UX designers to send their final design to the website owner in its final form without the need to be edited again.
To have knowledge about work of the other side
Collaboration between UX designers and web developers reaches its higher level if both of them have some knowledge about the work of the other team. UX designers don’t have to be experts in programing languages, but a reasonable knowledge about of them help to set accurate expectations about the required website design that will make it easier for web developers to achieve their job. So, it is recommended for UX designers to access online and offline resources about programing languages education.
Keep up with to trends
A successful website always come from the collaborative discussion on a regular basis about most recent industry trends. For examples, meetings between UX designers and web developers regarding recent trends can help designers particularlyto discover the new tools and innovations that have become available for use. Acquired new features be the collaborative discussion will help to introduce improvements to the project that will exactly make it easier for web developers to implement the agreed up on ideas.
Make primary prototypes
The creativity of UX designers may make it confusing to reach a final design. So, it is recommended to translate their creativity into different prototypes with different designs. Then they can share their prototypes with web developers who will consider positive sides and negative sides of each prototype in terms of the available budget and abilities. So, they could together reach a final prototype to be the website design.
Quality assurance
The quality assurance process is the final step before launching the website, it is mainly related to web developers. But if they carried on this responsibility without involving UX designers, they may focus only on getting the functional website without considering its beauty. UX designers’ thoughts regarding spacing or font size that may be overlooked by web developers are essential to complete the overall image of the website.
Finally, we learned that a perfect website is not a result of the individual efforts excreted by UX designers and web developers, but it is all about the effective collaboration between each other and by the way they prioritize tasks to make it easier for themselves during different stages of the project.
