Add a designer to your team!

It’s been a long road until now. When you are involved in a start up and your are mixed up in development there are a lot of skills you have to learn, this time I will focus on design. 

People think that development skills are the most important to make a software app, and certainly it is very important to get the desired functionality, but you must know that it is not all, because there is the user experience UX in the customer side. Without a well designed app, the user in this time quickly can drop or uninstall our app because it is hard to understand, complicated or not visual. The customer doesn’t have patience, now he likes simplicity above all because her work is enough complicated already to learn the new app instructions manual.

There are a lot of books to learn UI/UX, from the basic like “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug, to help us understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design to “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, but keep our eyes to the development stage. It is well know that there are frontend developers who likes take care of all these little thinks called pixels on the window, he knows at least Javascript, Html, Css, and of course how to get the desired skin with your framework software, whatever will be, taking care of SOLID, MVC, reusability and others techniques to achieve the goal and be organized in the process.

But, developers are not designers, no, nope. Designers must take care where, how, and why of all the things on the page. Good designers are in front of the customer , they have to use the customer view and be exquisite where to put all the stuff, buttons, textbox, fields on a form… The designer should have a good knowledge of html and css to translate the final skin to the developer, you know padding, margin, divs and so on. They have to know all the components used with the framework UI package, and be organized to make a good style folder where to put all the designs, components, colors, layers, etc.

There must be a magnificent communication between them because developers have to care about the behavior, make the skin agile and the components inside, and be accurate following the designer schemas and of course all must be maintained over time, so the designer have to speak a lot with the CPO but also with developers to know specific behavior questions to achieve both the goal: be simple and be usable for the customer, otherwise you can get a nice design with a desperate loading time or something worse. 

So the last point is that a good designer must have the best tools to made all this magic, there are a lot of good tools in the marked to create, prototype and design digital content, please don’t be stingy with it. A good tool is crucial, because the design stage can go in parallel with others developments in the software room, and simply because developers have no fault about how the page will be if they follow designer schemas and avoid unpleasant surprises after spending a lot of hours making software. The designer should do the skin as it will show to the final product (or at least 95% accurate, keeping a little room to developer in changing something to be more agile) .Designer can include if required animations to understand the behavior and test it before. Yes, I said test, because there are also tools to do and simulate component behavior on design stage. If you have a designer to make some icons you are wrong perhaps he can make a lot more.

If you are a product manager, there is an added prize for you !, you can review and agree with the final resulting view before any developer spend a single second (of its expensive time) doing anything, sell the product before it will be done, or better even, contrast with the beta customers to be sure they’re satisfied with it. So, If you are a developer, please take care of your design team because they spend time with the CPO and get your job a lot easier.

Be happy.! ??