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The Clear View Method for Design Handoff
Well-designed products emerge when product teams play nice and collaborate on an even playing field with ease. An overcomplicated design-to-dev handoff process is a barrier to that.
CollabSoft recommends a simpler approach to handing over designs: the Clear View Method.
The Clear View Method emphasizes the need for product teams to have a clear view of everything they need to successfully deliver a design. The goal? To make the design handoff process quicker and easier while still ensuring that the final build is exactly what designers intend.
1
Build and document a design system prior to handoff
Developers and designers should work together to create a design system containing design principles, component and pattern libraries, and visual language. This should be documented in a collaboration tool that everyone has easy access to, like Confluence, not in a design tool that only the designers really know how to use.
2
Handoff isn’t a one-and-done process
The moment a final design is handed over shouldn’t be the beginning or end of the process. In order to make great products efficiently, there needs to be ongoing discussions along the way, from project kickoff to the release of the feature.
3
Make your work management tool your single source of truth
Your designers and developers are probably using work management tools like Jira and Confluence. This is where design handoff should take place. Don’t make handoffs happen in your design tool. Devs don’t want to be in the design tool any more than designers want to be in their coding tools. Some companies will add a further tool to the mix, like Zeplin, to act as a bridge between design and dev. But your work management tool is already perfectly placed to be that bridge.
4
Hand off a locked-in design
A design that keeps changing in a design handoff document can lead to scope creep and rework that derails timelines and disrupts the allocation of resources. Handing over a final design that’s “locked for editing” provides developers with stable requirements. This helps minimize rework, respects developer workflows, facilitates QA and testing, and maintains the integrity of your design handoff document.
5
Practice flexible rigidity
“Locked in” doesn’t mean “no going back”. Flexible rigidity means not being too rigid or too flexible about handing over a final design. A design shouldn’t keep changing while a dev is trying to work on it, nor should a designer be prevented from making necessary changes after a design is finalized. A good practice is to lock in a design, discuss it, gather feedback, and work on a new version—which you then lock in again.
6
Hand off to everyone
A band can’t play music if only one of the members knows what you’re playing. It’s good practice for designers to hand over to all stakeholders using documentation everyone can access and interact on. Then host a meeting with developers, product owners, support teams, and anyone else who can offer input and value. This helps make sure the feature is continuing to solve the right problems and meet the needs of the user.