Often times designers and developers’ relationships are contentious. Designers want features that would require two Googles to run and developers want features that nobody but the nerdiest of the nerds would care about. This panel will showcase some of the top designers and developers who have worked through their differences and feel they’re making better products as a result. Sometimes designers know users’ needs best and sometimes developers can enhance a feature with their innate understanding of the system. Knowing this, why can’t we all just get along?

Day 5 starts with Designers and Developers with the following panel:

• Chris Lea - Media Temple/Virb
• Liz Danzico - The School of Visual Arts - Panelist Moderator
• Ryan Sims - Virb
• Joe Stump - Digg
• Daniel Burka - Digg/Pownce
• Andy Beaumont - Flutter + Wow
• Rob Corradi - NeonState

Communication breakdown is usually the start of an end when it comes to working together on a project between developer and designers. Figuring out on how to think about better ways to collaborate and get along with the language barriers, environments etc can be a difficult and painful task at some time during the lifecycle of a project. But this doesn’t just apply to designers and developers, it can also involve other members of the team that are involved at some stage of the process.

Do we need to move away from the Mechanic syndrome of the past or embrace it?! Giving a problem to one source to solve and not realising the actual problem itself?! In one way, I guess we need to avoid this type syndrome by using methods like …

• Design Firm
• In-house teams
• Independent Consultants

The single most important goal really is to collaborate to work together to arrive at a just get things done approach. The thing is, are we afraid to collaborate, is there a language barrier and how can we work faster to arrive here?! Attendees were asked to write down a question on the index cards given and the panelist gets one minute to respond. This proved to be very entertaining indeed with some very good questions from the floor.

Doing a real-time analysis for designers, developers and neither category to see what type of audience have turned up to the event was very good with only 11 questions from developers and over 100 from designers and others. It was interesting to see soo many people that didn’t know each other actually collobrate with each other, which I guess was the whole point of the talk. Very clever! It was a really good way of breaking the ice with the panelist and the attendees.

Panel Questions
Q. Why is there this battle between developers and designers?!
A. Designs can be very much against the user expereince from the designers and the developers have to fight against this. It’s not that we are competing to “own” the project it’s all about making sure that we both work together.

Q. How to create a smooth environment in the team
A. Joe from Digg, they have a mutual trust between the 2 sides and the markup is very clean and CSS and that’s done by the designers, is far much better than the developers could do. Making sure that the technical concerns are taken into account as well. If you work with an amazing bunch of people, the process shouldn’t be that much more difficult. It’s better than it was at Digg when they first started, there was constant problems between the 2 teams. Things get annoying when decisions are made before the developers and designers have been involved and the business go and sign-off the work that may not easily be technically implemented. Sometimes it’s not practical on a short term basis and cost-effective.

Q. Single words you don’t wanna hear.
A. Synergy, real-time, memcache! (attendees liked this very much!)

Conclusions and thoughts to the debate
It’s better just to start a discussion with all the people involved, not just the owners and the business. Don’t go it alone. The guys that are actually going to build and maintain this MUST be involved from the very beginning.

If the developer can’t explain, then they are either lying or just a shitty developer! As designers, we are responsible for looking at stuff and you will find you will gain lots more respect from the developers if you get involved in stuff you don’t really understand and stop using shitty acronyms. Also, be careful not to characterize each other to avoid alienation.

A brief end discussion around the commitment of a team or an individual was raised and one of the panelists said that “If developers don’t want to know about new technologies and is pushing it back because it’s hard or its new, just bloody fire them!!” Very god question.

Project Manager’s can sometimes pretend to be designers and developers. The worst ones are the ones that pass on EVERY request that a client asks without challenging it based on a lack of technical knowledge. The best ones are the ones that know both sides of the fence as such and will challenge as and when neeeded.

And finally, pieces of advice when you get back to the office: