How UX Specialists Bridge Design and Development

Here's a puzzle. A client asks for more precise app mockups before signing off on your latest version. Meanwhile, your developer claims that the graphic designer doesn't consider technical feasibility when designing components, and has volunteered to take on all app development responsibilities. In short, you have one unhappy designer, a client with visual preferences, an overly enthusiastic developer, and a stressed project manager.

Your developers might share this feeling if you lack a UX specialist.

Now solve for X—or UX in this case, because this project is missing a user experience (UX) design specialist.

Sure, it might be tempting to just let the developer code a working prototype. The client will sign off on a technically feasible app design, and it'll save a lot of time during the design sprint. But cutting corners on UX can increase work in other areas.

Developers and designers who work together can effectively eliminate unnecessary, costly fixes.

Here are five reasons why you should hire a UX design specialist to bridge the gap between design and development, rather than relying on a developer to play both roles.

1. Clients need to see low-fidelity iterations. In early iterations, it's important for the client to see "bare-bones" sketches focused on layout, not aesthetics. For instance, you don't want the client to get distracted by a specific hero image when you're asking them to approve the navigation structure and layout of the app. When you involve a developer instead of a UX design specialist, there's a high chance that the app design will be more detailed than necessary at that stage, since developers usually work in the execution phase of the project.
2. Design changes. Design prototyping tools like Axure and Sketch are built for an efficient, iterative design process. Using such tools, it's often far easier to move components around and make changes on the fly than for a developer to recode changes in a full-blown, production-level prototype. This becomes especially problematic when the client wants to wait for the final prototype before signing off on the design. Changes in code will likely take longer and cost more than changes made in a UX prototyping tool.
3. UX specialists can also create interactive prototypes. Axure and Sketch have features that allow a UX designer to create interactive prototypes. If the only way for a client to approve the app design is to see it in action, a design tool that enables building sliders, accordions, and other interactive features can serve as an alternative to a coded prototype. As a bonus, these interactive prototypes can also be published and used in usability testing.
4. Developers often focus on the trees. As the saying goes, developers are often so focused on working at the tree level that they miss the forest. UX strategy requires knowledge of business goals, user research, and data analysis, plus the ability to synthesize that information into actionable, enterprise-level insights. Developers, on the other hand, tend to focus on the code that builds a scalable web service—that level of detail can make it hard to grasp how the user interacts with the front-end of the site to form the overall customer impression.
5. UX specialists advocate for end users and internal developers. Using UX prototyping software, UX design specialists create annotated wireframes with the necessary UX specifications and design constraints that developers can refer to when building the final app product. Providing developers with approved dimensions and content helps greatly reduce confusion in code choices, the number of code iterations, execution time, and development cost.