Use this easy checklist to ensure a smooth design handoff
When a design cycle is complete, all implementation details must be communicated to the development team. The design handoff describes this procedure.
A standard part of this handoff is the exchange of links to various digital assets. The nature of your business will determine the nature of the deliverables you provide. Typically, you will receive a mix of the following when purchasing a digital product:
- The user takes action. It depicts a user’s actions with the product to accomplish a goal. Helpful for verifying our edge case handling and determining which elements link to which.
- Specifications for the display. Everything that has to do with screen pixel art. Utilised by programmers to ensure the finished output follows your designs.
- Assets and moving pictures. While the specifics will vary from process to process, this typically includes delivering high-resolution photos or JSON files.
- Prototypes. They show a developer how you want the final product to behave and are sometimes made for purposes like user testing.
Because of its potential impact, a design document warrants special care. This procedure can be streamlined significantly with the help of current design tools like Zeplin and Figma. But, designers still need to make an effort.
All hail the design doc
Many of the tasks that product managers and developers perform are already well documented. They do this so everyone may work off the same facts. The same holds true for designers.
A design document’s usefulness extends much beyond that of a mere source of information.
- Exhibit your wares. All the hard work behind the doors, from competitor research to usability reports, may be made public.
- The evolution of the log format. Including meeting notes from design reviews helps explain the thought process of making specific design choices.
- Establish a repeatable procedure. The consistent use of a plan of action for all your projects will force you to evaluate your methods. It serves as a benchmark against which your actions can be evaluated.
- Create a benchmark for good design. A design document is just another design deliverable if everyone on the team uses it. You may confidently onboard a new designer by directing them to all your lovely design documents. Others around you will have a firm grasp on what kind of behaviour to anticipate from you.
Sending an Invison link via Slack differs from writing a short design document by hand. How you present your work to others reflects poorly on you and your design team. It’s always beneficial to put in the extra work.
Tips for improving your design handoffs
Our processes as designers are distinct from those of coders.
Transfers should be mutually beneficial. If you want things to go well, consider the developers and product managers using your design document.
Pay attention to detail
Being thorough when producing final deliverables will help you avoid unnecessary back-and-forth, which can be annoying.
The time spent fixing mistakes after a handoff can add up quickly. Is it normal to inquire about something that seems obvious but may not be to developers?
- Verify that your connections work. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to access anything online only to discover that the link you tried to access is no longer active. Please don’t be the one to bring this on. Before submitting your paper, ensure all the links are open in separate tabs.
- Maintain an orderly aesthetic in your designs. Correcting little errors like misspellings can have a considerable impact. Your packaging should be given the same care as your designs. Only tell your team about it if you’d be willing to claim it as your own.
- Just check everything over! Verify your flows’ reasoning, ensure you have the required resources and account for every possible scenario. Your team will take whatever you say at face value, so make sure it’s accurate.
- Speak firmly and unambiguously. Without clear and precise documentation, your developers will have questions. Maybe they’ll hazard a guess that turns out to be entirely off base. Time spent correcting mistakes is reduced in proportion to the clarity of your detailing.
Think about their experience
Our processes as designers are distinct from those of coders.
Transfers should be mutually beneficial. If you want things to go well, consider the developers and product managers using your design document.
- Please be explicit. Make sure the layout of your document is appropriate for their needs. Everybody who visits your doc searching for a particular thing should be able to locate it without any trouble.
- Inquire of them. You should coordinate your efforts with them to determine how to speed up your team’s workflow. To a certain extent, every squad has its own identity. Learn who yours is.
- Observe their efforts. Because of how well we know our equipment, we tend to favour it. Share with your developers any keyboard shortcuts you’ve learned that have streamlined your use of a particular programme.
Keep your finger on the pulse
Immediately diving into the next project after a handover is appealing.
Going AWOL and making a snap decision in this state might be risky. Be there and be encouraging.
- Show up for review meetings. Observing the final working product lets, you learn how developers interpret your design documents.
- Don’t close your mind. Developers’ recommendations to alter the design occasionally make it into production. There are several possible explanations for this, and we need to hear them out. We don’t act as filters. It’s OK if others with more knowledge than us alter our designs.
- Keep your word. Developers will start implementing your plans when you hand off your work to them. The onus is on you to step in and assist them if you need to remember something. A blocked worker with a strict work schedule will cause problems for everyone.
Be an asset to your team
You are needed.
Nothing is more important than having a positive team-player mentality, regardless of how talented a designer you may be.
- Take on a pleasant demeanour. An offensive designer is universally reviled. Act in a way that makes people feel safe talking to you about anything they think. Even if you disagree, you should try to get along with them.
- Do what you can to assist. Do what you can to assist the team, even if it’s outside of your job description. Wrapping loose ends is even more important than handing off the design doc.
- Try to maintain an attitude of hunger and curiosity. The best designers are those who are well-rounded in other areas as well. You will develop empathy and become a more skilled designer if you take the time to learn about other people’s processes.
- Collaboration is essential in the design and construction phases. As the final gatekeeper before your designs reach the consumer, ensuring that the developers correctly implement them is in your best interest. This is why hangovers play such a crucial role.
Individuals within your product team are the target audience for any internal documentation. Remember their wants and desires, and provide them with a solution that improves their quality of life. If you do a good job, members of your team will go back to your design document time and time again, which will have an impact on how they go about their day-to-day tasks.
The incredible power of Zero-UI technology
For better or worse, much design work is still visual these days. This makes sense since the essential products we interact with have screens.
Television introduced us to screens in 1938 for the first time. Ever since, our world has been flooded with Computers, iPods, smartphones, tablets… and more and more types of screen-based devices.
Hence, today only a minute goes by without interacting with a screen.
The Internet of Things, coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999, surrounds us with intelligent devices. In 2020 more than 10 billion devices were already connected to the Internet — and by 2025, this amount is expected to double up to 20 billion.
So, knowing that intelligent machines can hear our words, anticipate our needs, and sense our gestures, what does that mean for the future of design, especially as those screens go away?
Let’s discover together what this so-called Zero-UI stands for.
What is Zero-UI?
It isn’t a new idea. I bet you are already familiar with it.
Zero User Interface, or Zero-UI, is an increasingly popular concept first coined by designer Andy Goodman, formerly at Accenture Interactive’s agency.
Have you ever used an Amazon Echo, talked to your iPhone using Siri, or skipped a song, double-tipping your AirPods? Then, you’ve already used a device that could be considered part of this so-called Zero-UI concept!
It is about getting away from the touchscreen and interfacing with the devices around us more naturally. This includes different fields such as haptics, computer vision, voice control, and even artificial intelligence.
Why do we need this transition?
It is aimed to allow more natural interactions when compared to screen-based devices.
To understand the need for this transition let’s look at how we currently communicate with technology to understand the need for this transition. Most of us interact with our devices daily through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
A GUI interface allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators. It can be a displaying screen — for computers — or a touchscreen for any phone or tablet. Thus, users must still use a mouse and keyboard combination or tapping and swiping to transmit information.
If you look at the history of computing, starting with the jacquard loom in 1801, humans have always had to interact with machines abstractly and complexly.
— by Andy Goodman.
Interfaces have come a long way from their humble origins, but they still need to provide the best experiences for those who use them. We download an endless amount of apps and click through too many screens in an attempt to perform daily tasks.
Luckily, designers and developers are addressing the issue to bring forth some exciting changes to help out with this problem. Just like computers evolved from being used via running code in a terminal to having a friendly and intuitive graphical interface, the next natural step has no interface.
Today, machines still force us to come to them on their terms, speaking their language. The next step for electronic devices is to finally understand us on our terms, in our own natural words, behaviours, and gestures.
This is precisely where Zero-UI appears. It is aimed to allow more natural interactions when compared to screen-based devices. At the helm of this transition are both gesture-based and voice-recognition user interfaces.
According to Dharmik, the gaming world has been one of the first to adopt gesture controls to provide a more natural user experience. The Nintendo Wii console was launched in 2006 and contained gesture-based controllers or later models. You can watch the revolutionary launch of Wii advertising below!
Launching advertising of Wii.
The world has fallen for the charm of this so-called Zero-UI, which will not likely change.
Voice recognition is another common Zero-UI feature found in our daily life. During the 2000s, Google launched Google Voice Search. Until Alexa was first released in 2014, voice recognition experienced a commercial explosion. Ever since, more than 312 million Alexa devices have been sold. Amazon is expected to overpass this amount by 2025: 320 million are expected to be sold.
How will Zero-UI change the design?
This technology does — and will — create a massive effect on society.
According to Andy Goodman, Zero-UI represents a whole new dimension for designers. He compares the designer’s leap from UI to Zero-UI as just designing for two sizes to thinking about what a user tries to do in any possible workflow.
Instead of relying on clicking, typing and tapping, users will now input information utilising voice, gestures, and touch. Interactions will move away from phones and computers and into physical devices. We will communicate instead.
The most important — and revolutionary — part of this concept is that it can be used for cities, homes, ecosystems, and personal devices.
Different Types of Zero-UI
There are various ways to communicate with current technology instead of relying on a visual screen, which can be used to achieve this desired Zero-UI.
Voice Recognition and Control
It’s a process where software or device identifies the human voice, understands some instruction, and performs a particular action accordingly. When a user asks a question or gives a statement to the software, the tool recognises and reacts to the user’s query.
The best examples of voice recognition and control are Siri and Amazon Echo.
Haptic Feedback
Haptic Feedback facilitates users with vibration-based Feedback. Even though we are already used to it when interacting with our phones, it is an integral part of wearable products such as fitness trackers and smartwatches as they enable users with notifications. It is also an essential feature for current game controllers — you can notice someone attacking you before seeing it on screen.
In the coming future, it will also be available with intelligent clothing.
Gesture-Based User Interface
It is one of the most natural ways of interaction. The gaming world first adopted this concept. It allows users to incorporate more motion and physical space properties than just button-based commands. The best examples of a gesture-based user interface are Microsoft Kinect, Think Wii, and PlayStation Move.
Google’s Project Soli.
Google has also released a gesture control product Project, Soli. A sensing technology detects touchless gesture interaction using a small radar.
Context Awareness
Contextually aware apps and devices facilitate users with a more simplified physical and digital experience by anticipating their needs. It eliminates all additional layers of interaction.
The AirPods are one of the best examples. By introducing sensors into a device or location data, we can design next-generation contextual experience that offers more implicit interaction rather than explicit.
These are some of the most common — and already working — ways to communicate with technology. Upcoming times will introduce breakthrough devices with these outstanding capabilities and even more.
Zero-UI will rely on Data and AI.
As we move away from screens, many of our interfaces will have to become more automatic, anticipatory, and predictive.
Whereas interface designers right now live in apps like InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, the non-linear design problems of Zero-UI will require vastly different tools and skill sets.
Designers will have to become experts in science, biology, and psychology to create these devices… stuff we don’t have to think about when screens constrain our designs.
— Andy Goodman.
One clear example would be designing a TV controller. Depending on who is standing in front of that TV, the gestures it needs to understand to do something as simple as turn up the volume might be radically different: a 40-year-old might twist an imaginary dial in mid-air, while a millennial might jerk their thumb up.
What’s after Zero-UI?
Zero-UI is the ultra-modern version of artificial intelligence.
Zero-UI is meant to allow users to experience more human-like interactions. Soon Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa will become the memories of the precious past of the tech world.
Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the concept of the ‘device’ to disappear.
— by Sundar Pichai, Google C.E.O