Reasons why your developer hates you #7

After a long hiatus, reasons why your develop hates you is back! In case you didn’t get a chance to check out reasons 1 – 6 or if you need a reminder, here they are:

Reasons your developer hates you:
1. Your requirements are unclear and incomplete and yet you expect a concrete answer to your question.
2. You bring us to the playing field after the game is over.
3. You don’t really know what I do and don’t take the time to care.
4. We don’t like when you change your mind… especially when we don’t hear about it.
5. We don’t like when you make us do work.
6. You’re not learning anything about this technology.
7. And without further adieu reason number 7 (inspired by fellow UXer Shaun Rance): You don’t know digital.

For most of us, this may seem a pretty far reach. Many UXers work in digital after all. We create websites and mobile applications and immerse ourselves in technology. However, we might not fully realize the amount of work that goes into creating a digital product. “Digital”, as opposed to print or television, is a huge amount of work for most everyone involved. This is not to say that print or television do not include a great deal of work, but in this case it is different work. It is more than just mocking up a wireframe or a comp and passing it along to production. It involves familiarity with the system and with the users of the system. It includes providing detailed instructions on how the entire site or product should work including navigation and more detailed interactions. And not to forget imagery that can be easily consumed by the development team. Also, depending on your team structure UX digital hand off can include front end code (HTML, CSS< JavaScript) that is valid as well as reusable. The list goes on and on.
So, why does the fact that you don’t know digital frustrate your development team? Simply because it makes their job much harder by giving them much more work. This slows the entire process down, and is highly inefficient. Imagine that one hands off imagery that is not properly sized, is unusable and is in a non-web friendly format. Your developer now has to either contact you and get you to redo the work in a format that works, or has to figure out how to size images themselves, which could affect the quality of the images. In addition, some UXers might not think to map out all the interactions that could happen on their website in extreme detail (and I mean detail like saying “hovering over the link invokes this flyover which should disappear in 2 seconds”) but if you don’t, who do you think will? Your developer? Do you think they have time for that? If we want to see our design developed properly and work the way we have in our heads, we have to enable our developers to be successful by providing them the deliverables they need.

What does it all come down to? If you truly want to be a good interaction/user experience designer in the digital world, learn the process. Know your role from start to finish (and yes, you should be involved in the project from start to finish). Understand the deliverables that you are responsible for and the level of detail that you need to provide. This is invaluable, time saving work that not only makes your entire project team more successful, but also, in the end, makes your user’s experience more delightful.