Developers: how to work with designers (part 1)

Summary

• We shouldn’t be turning developers into designers, or vice versa, but developers can work better with designers by learning about their craft and priorities.
• Designers don’t like “quick and dirty”. Designers are paid to care how their work looks. Give them time and space to make something look good and don’t rush to implement it before it’s ready.
• Remember that the value of a good design isn’t easily quantifiable. You have to trust that the designer knows what they’re talking about.
• The quickest way to a designer’s heart is to care about the little details.

From forced assimilation to respectful synergy

Developers want to know how to work better with designers, but a lot of the advice out there seems to be: well, they should learn design.

Some go even further, bridging the gap by erasing the gap. Like Netflix and their full cycle development model, which turns developers into designers and vice versa.  

But making designers and developers become more like the other is not a realistic or desirable scenario for many designers and developers. They’re different. Fact. They have different objectives, different ways of working, and different brains.

So, in this two-part article, we’re going to stop talking forced assimilation and start talking respectful synergy.

In the first article, we’ll explore how to work with designers. In the second, we’ll look at how to work with developers.

Learn to speak the language of design

Development teams often talk about metrics, not users. For example, a dev team’s goal might be to optimize the conversion rate on an account registration page by X%.

But a designer won’t talk in these terms. They’ll talk about making it easier for users to sign up.

The language difference matters. The first approach is focused on what the company needs to do to be successful: increase conversion rates. But the second speaks to the value for the end user.

End users and their problems/needs are at the heart of everything designers do. So developers can get on the same page as them by translating a metrics-oriented goal into a user-oriented one.

Understand that designers don’t like ‘quick and dirty’

Agile product development gets equated with the mantra, “fail fast and often”. Frankly, this is a stupid saying and that’s why it’s so often misused.

Its real aim is not to fail regularly but to be iterative, to be open to failure and learning from our mistakes. But instead it’s used to encourage releasing rubbish work in the name of speed, aka quick and dirty.

“'Fail fast, fail often' is not only being used incorrectly as a cousin to Lean and Agile, it is creating a culture of people aiming for the short-term, living in a world of frenetic bedlam. Instead of calmly and intelligently iterating, employees race to complete something (failing) while racing to the next objective as quickly as possible (failing, but quicker). When “fail fast, fail often” is invoked, it cannot become a culture where speed trumps the time we need to spend on creativity.”
Dan Pontefract, Leadership Strategist and Author

We learned from talking to our customers about UX designer problems that design is suffering because managers are pushing for quick and dirty releases that can be ‘fixed later'. Only they’re never fixed later. Design tweaks get tossed on the backlog and forgotten about because there’s a sense among the developers and the managers that they weren’t important in the first place.

This has to stop. If you want to know how to work with designers, know that they don’t do quick and dirty. They’re perfectionists, they care about how their work looks. And that’s the job they’re being paid for.

That doesn’t mean they’re not agile. Good designers iterate on designs and seek continuous feedback throughout. But they still need the space and time to be creative and produce something they’re happy with. The best way of working with designers is to respect that. Don’t rush things out the door before they’re ready. Customers don’t actually like that either.

Don’t expect to easily measure what makes a good design

It’s hard to point at short-term quantitative metrics that go up or down because of a design or design change. Among a designer’s goals are user trust, comprehension, clarity, and delight. Good designs can positively affect these things, but it’s very difficult to quantify them with numbers.

For example, designers don’t want apps or web pages to become cluttered. But at what point does adding one more thing make it cluttered? It’s unlikely that the addition of one extra thing is going to cause users to start fleeing to other apps, but over time, unnecessary bits and pieces will start to impact how people see yours.

By the same token, designers push for consistency between different parts of an app or system. If the menu is in a different place, or buttons have different styles, or clicking behavior varies, then users can’t properly anticipate how things will work. They’ll get confused and frustrated, and eventually they may choose to uninstall the app. But it’s hard to blame the cause of the uninstall on any one thing.

The best way of handling this is to trust the designer. They’re the experts in making apps more engaging, usable, and satisfying for the end user. So trust that they know what they’re talking about even though you can’t translate it into exact figures.

That doesn’t mean you can’t push back on some things. Designers aren’t perfect and sometimes their balance of what’s important is off. They may overvalue an individual’s experience over that of an entire population or network. This only highlights the importance of designer-developer collaboration and open lines of communication between the two.

Care about the details

The fastest way to a designer’s heart is to care about the little details. In our survey on designers and developers working together in 2025, 52% of designers said that implementations of their designs were “good enough”. Only 21% said they were “pixel-perfect”.

This suggests that designs are being compromised at the development stage. This could be for reasons of speed, technical feasibility, or because devs are dismissing small details as unimportant.

But there’s usually a reason behind every detail. Developers should get involved earlier in the design process so that they can understand and appreciate those reasons. Designers LOVE to work with developers who value design.

So, if you want to know how to work with designers in a more meaningful and rewarding way, go the extra mile to get a small detail right.

Key takeaways

Basically, developers can work better with designers by appreciating their work more than perhaps they did in the past.

They don’t need to become designers, but they do need to respect that excellent product design is vital and elemental to creating products that customers love and keep using.

So, try to understand the problems your designers are focused on. Look at everything from the perspective of your users and trust your designers to know what users want. And aim for pixel-perfect implementations for the express purpose of delighting a user. Because it’s not just your designers who want to create really awesome and useful shit. You want that too.

Now that developers know how to make designers happy, the next blog is for designers who want to know how to make developers happy. Stay tuned.