Design delivery is much easier than it was 10 years ago. And it’s because we’re all sat at home in sweatpants.

The design-to-dev delivery process used to happen in the office, back when meetings had donuts and silos had doors. But co-located handoffs consisted of designers sending Photoshop or Sketch files to developers by email, Dropbox link, or *shudder* USB stick. If the designer made a change, they’d need to manually re-export the file and send it again. Cue a dozen sources of truth and hellish filenames like homepage_final_FINAL_2_revised_v8.

Fast forward to today and design delivery is actually easier than it was. What changed?

Remote working didn’t kill collaboration, it upgraded it

When the pandemic hit, companies feared that their remote workers would struggle to collaborate. But suddenly all our tooling got better, fast.

Because we weren’t all in the office together, we were forced to rely more heavily on cloud-based platforms for work management and collaboration, such as Figma, Jira, Zoom, Confluence, Loom, and Slack.

Now, designers could share links to live designs with devs instead of all that convoluted offline file sharing. Video tools gave us screen-sharing, recording, annotation, video editing, and transcription, making it easier for designers to communicate flow and context. Easier written comms got us talking more openly about designs. And cloud-based work management and document collaboration gave us new visibility of the design delivery process.

As a result, the shift to remote work has actually reduced silos and misalignment for many teams. Design delivery is more centralized and transparent, and it’s easier to understand a designer’s mockups by jumping on a Zoom call than everyone huddling around a single laptop screen.

But silos can still form…

Of course, if your remote teams don’t use the right technology in the right way, silos can still form. This often happens when there’s an overabundance of tools and a lack of unanimity on the lines of communication.

Silos in distributed teams can be harder to break than the ones we used to have in the office. If someone stops communicating, you can’t hop over to their desk and be like, “Erm, are you GOING to answer my question?”

However, there are ways of overcoming these challenges in remote design collaboration so that your product teams stay aligned, responsive, and efficient.

How to overcome design delivery challenges in distributed teams

Remote work is the new standard, which means design delivery today is about successfully harmonizing form and function across borders and time zones. Here are some ways of stopping borders and time zones from creating silos.

Bridge the gap with a design system that’s accessible to all

Let’s face it, your design handoffs aren’t going to be effective or efficient if you don’t have a design system, or you’re not using the one you have properly.

The 2023 DesignOps Benchmarking Report revealed that 68% of design and dev teams think poor design system adoption is the main cause of design-to-dev inefficiency.  

So, make sure you have a fully documented design system in a central space, ideally a general team documentation tool like Confluence that everyone has access to. The tool should have integrations with your design and development tools so that you can display component designs alongside components in code. For example, CollabSoft’s Figma for Confluence app allows you to embed Figma frames in Confluence pages so that users can view and download them without logging in to Figma.

Whatever you do, don’t put your design system in a designer-only tool like Figma, or a developer-only tool like Storybook. You’re only making adoption by everyone more difficult.

Create a single source of truth

A single source of truth for design deliverables and feedback is even more important in remote teams. Yet, many teams' handoff processes are spread across a mix of tools, like Figma, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Zeplin, and Slack. Trying to do design delivery across all these tools is going to make it much more difficult for designers, developers, and other stakeholders to get aligned. Particularly when only some of the product team have access to or know how to use them.  

So, home in on one or two tools for your design documentation and handoff. These should be general collaboration tools, and if your company uses Jira and Confluence, these are perfect. Confluence can be your single source of truth for design documentation, Jira your single source of truth for development work. Use CollabSoft’s Figma for Jira and Figma for Confluence integrations to embed Figma designs in Jira tickets and Confluence pages so that devs and other stakeholders don’t have to navigate Figma to view designs.

Arrange regular feedback sessions and status meetings

The main drawback of remote working is that it’s harder to keep people engaged because you’re not in the same room. You can’t shout across the desk asking what someone thinks of an idea.

Slack has become the written comms version of chatting about stuff in the office. But working from home makes it a lot easier to hide from our colleagues if that’s our inclination. Designers, in particular, may feel extra-tempted to retreat to their cave of wireframes and mockups and not emerge till a pixel-perfect design is ready.

But in order to deliver a design that improves users' experiences, feedback needs to be sought early and regularly. There should be a project kickoff meeting where the designer outlines the problem to be solved and seeks feedback from the team on any early ideas and mockups. Then there should be regular check-ins before, during, and after design handoff to discuss issues, review changes, and check that the design is continuing to solve the right problems.

Designers should involve devs a lot earlier if they want them to appreciate the value of their designs. And designers should be talking to devs about technical feasibility so that they’re not building castles in the sky.

Importantly, these meetings should be in person over a video call. Detailed documentation and easy access to the right version of a design are great. But sometimes, what’s really needed for a dev to get started is a face-to-face chat.

‍“It’s always best to jump on a call with everyone at design handoff. Designers can walk us through the flow and devs can flag anything that can’t be done. It’s great for helping devs to see what’s important from a usability perspective, and designers to see the edge cases where their mockups might not make sense.”
Romina Gomez, Lead Frontend Engineer, Struck Studio

Institute a way of working that helps achieve all the above

It’s easy to say: start doing this. It’s way harder to actually do it. Sometimes it’s better to take a few steps back and adopt some principles that underlie how you want to work first.

For example, if you were to adopt something like the Clear View Method for Design Handoff, and bake its principles into your day-to-day, you’d find it easier to get buy-in from your team.

The Clear View Method is a way of making the developer handoff process simpler and easier while ensuring that the final product aligns with the designer’s vision for the user experience. There are 6 principles, but the first 3 are most relevant here:

1. Build and document a design system prior to handoff
2. Handoff isn’t a one-and-done process
3. Make your work management tool your single source of truth

Find out more about how the Clear View Method can help give product teams a clear view of everything they need to successfully deliver a design.

Big takeaways

Great design delivery is easier to achieve in the distributed landscape. It’s because the tooling we have to work remotely is so much better than the jungle of siloed files and folders we used to have in the office.

But here’s the kicker: it’s also a lot easier to fall back into silos—chunkier, more impenetrable ones—if we don’t streamline our tooling and establish clear lines of communication.

There are four ways of avoiding design delivery silos:

1. Bridge the gap between designers and developers with a design system that’s accessible to both (and other) teams.
2. Create a single source of truth for design deliverables and design communication, ideally in a work management tool that everyone uses.
3. Arrange regular face-to-face meetings to get feedback and maintain open lines of communication throughout the design delivery process.
4. Institute a set of principles that underlie this more streamlined way of doing design delivery, such as the Clear View Method for Design Handoff.

Design delivery used to fail because the handoff process consisted of teams throwing work at each other over a very high wall. With the tooling we have at our disposal today, those walls are lower than they’ve ever been, and super-easy to talk over. We just have to make sure we do.