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Bertil Muth
Bertil Muth

Posted on

Do UX people and devs need to collaborate more closely?

In some organizations I‘ve seen a divide in separate teams, leading to synchronization issues that could have been avoided.

Also, I‘ve sometimes seen UX design carried out as a big upfront activity, which turned out to be waste when features changed.

What are your experiences?

Top comments (3)

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murkrage profile image
Mike Ekkel • Edited

To answer your question: 100% yes.

I started out as a UX designer. Got a degree in it and everything. While obtaining my degree I figured out I really liked code as well, so I started doing it on the side. Then I started gaining some real world experience as a designer and quickly found there's a pretty sizeable gap between design and development.

Whether that's because of designers or developers is irrelevant, but the core of it is not understanding each other. Designers don't always know why something is or isn't possible and developers don't always know why a design has been designed the way it is.

I ended up becoming a developer to bridge that gap. To get design and development closer together to improve the products we're working on.

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vinceramces profile image
Vince Ramces Oliveros

Yes. I've experienced before as UX Designer. I've been assign to do the database model, front-end, and most importantly, User experience. But strangely though. I find it hard to communicate with my team especially I got isolated from the table and find it uneasy to go back and fort to their workstation just to ask a question(please! just send me a message or code snippet if something went wrong!)

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bwolkerstorfer profile image
Bernhard Wolkerstorfer

I also think that UX and dev need to cooperate very close. In my company we have the UX designers in a separate team from a management perspective, but when it comes to the actual day to day business they are are part of the scrum teams.

As they are part of the whole development process we have UX guidance throughout, but devs, PMs and UX also work on the requirements and designs upfront. This increased our development speed and we can react to changes faster.