A great design process is what sets a successful product apart from one that fails. Understanding design for developers gives a clear sense of direction.
You know the features to add to a project, why they are needed, and how to transition seamlessly from design to development.
Learning how to design for developers makes you capable of functioning as a one-man team or a unicorn developer.
Becoming a unicorn developer sets you apart, but what does it mean in reality?
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What is a unicorn developer?
As far as mythical creatures go, unicorns are one of the rarest and most popular of them.
In the tech industry, unicorn developers are individuals with skills in frontend, backend, and UI/UX development. These skills make them a great fit in teams that require creative solutions and versatility, but they are also hard to find.
Why hire a unicorn developer?
There are many reasons why unicorn developers stand out, and some of these are highlighted in the benefits they provide to a business:
- Reduced salary: Hiring unicorn developers doesn’t cost as much as hiring two separate individuals. This lower overhead frees up revenue for other activities, such as marketing, which can help you reach your business goals faster.
- Faster development: By eliminating communication gaps, there are fewer delays in software development.
- Versatility: Familiarity with different technologies allows unicorn developers operate independently without a team.
- Excellent UX output: Putting these developers in charge of design usually leads to higher-quality UX. This is because they focus not just on the visual aspects but also on the project’s functionality.
How to become a unicorn developer?
Like any other career path, becoming a unicorn developer requires learning and practice. For the best impact, you need to be competent in the specific areas listed below:
- Learn front-end development: Most unicorn developers start as front-end developers. This involves taking various courses, joining bootcamps, and building real-world projects.
- Improve as a UI/UX expert: Design skills are the highest priority for any unicorn developer. To develop these skills, you need to find a high-quality UI/UX bootcamp that includes practical, real-world examples.
- Understand the backend: Becoming a unicorn developer also involves handling backend development. This allows you to take a project from its ideation phase to its live launch.
- Constantly improve: You need to keep learning to stay relevant. You may choose to focus on growing your skills as a web developer, UX designer, or app developer to stay relevant.
How to think like a designer using design theory?
An important aspect of design for developers is the design theory. So what is it? It’s essentially a set of principles that you can follow as a developer to create high-quality product designs.
Understanding the elements of design theory helps in developing meaningful ways to connect with your market.
When applying the design theory, the following characteristics are what matter:
Repetition
This element focuses on the reuse of certain elements during the design process.
By repeating these specific objects, a design pattern appears, and the target audience becomes familiar with them. This familiarity forces the target audience to associate the repeated objects with the app, project, or brand.
Balance
Design balance can be symmetrical or tension-based, and this is determined by the project scope. It involves the weight distribution of various on-page objects to provide stability and cohesiveness.
Contrast
Contrast is one of the easiest design elements for anyone to understand. It involves using opposing objects to emphasize important details.
Popular examples of contrast in action include light and dark colors, small and large images, and cool and warm tones.
Alignment
Alignment allows designers to unify the entire design while creating a pattern or order to the visuals.
There are several alignment patterns, including optical, grid, centre, and edge alignment. By aligning design objects, you can make content more readable and provide a structure in your design.
Hierachy
Design hierarchy involves arranging visuals in a sequence that highlights their relative importance. You can achieve this by grouping related elements to lead the audience to a specific conclusion.
How to create stunning designs using color theory?
If you pay attention to the best apps, you’ll notice that they use a perfect blend of colors to evoke emotion.
For UI design, color theory plays a crucial role in providing user satisfaction.
Color theory provides a means to blend various colors to create harmony that appeals to anyone viewing your app or design. With so many colors, creating the right combination for your design can be difficult.
This is the case if you don’t follow specific rules of color theory.
When picking colors for your visual design, you must understand that specific colors align with certain moods. Red evokes passion, love, and anger, while yellow indicates joy and happiness. Understanding how colors affect people is essential for your design.
Another benefit of color theory is that it helps you identify unconventional colors that are rarely used. When you use these unconventional colors in your design, they instantly draw attention to the elements they highlight.
Picking the right color also improves the legibility of your text. Colors with high contrast, like white text on a dark background, make reading easy on your app.
Another great thing you learn in color theory is that simplicity is always the best. Some color mixes may appear unique, but they have a negative visual impact on users.
For instance, a red background with dark text can make reading hard, while too many bright colors can be overwhelming.
7 steps to take when creating a design
Creating your first design as a developer won’t be a piece of cake, but you can simplify the process by following specific steps. These steps function as a guide, but you can always add other areas that matter as you build more experience:
1. Create a project outline
An outline or brief contains all the vital information and considerations for your project. Here, you’ll have details that explain why the project is necessary, who will use the final product, and how it will work.
Depending on the company you work with, you’ll have specific design steps to follow, and itemizing them in the outline makes them easier to follow.
Other details you can specify in the outline include approved deadlines, the launch date, and the contact person’s details for assessments and approvals.
2. Do comprehensive research
Although you’ll already have some details from the project outline, it’s important that you go a step further. First, you can have a sit-down with the client (internal or external) to get more details regarding the project.
At this point, you must confirm the target audience, any preferences, and what problem the project must solve.
To get an idea of what to do and how to provide a better result, you can go through what is available from competitors. This gives you an idea of the end result and steers the UX design process towards achieving it.
3. Build a sitemap and wireframe
Sitemaps and wireframes are blueprints you create during the design process. These are skeletal frameworks of your app, website or project that show how the different pages will interact with one another.
Most of these are simple sketches, making them easy to adjust and great for quick testing.
When creating your sitemap, you’ll need to show a clear visual hierarchy of the various pages or screens that will appear in the project. You then need to highlight how these screens connect and how your users will move from one to the next.
After creating your sitemap and wireframe, you should have a clear structure for the app or project you’re designing.
Before proceeding to the next step, you must share your sitemap or wireframe with the client. This is necessary to get feedback and identify areas that you’ll need to adjust.
4. Create a mockup
At this point, you can start using design tools like Figma to implement designs and create a prototype. Your mockup will provide high-quality visuals of what the final project will look like once it’s built.
This is another extremely important step that requires the client’s input, since the final mockup will be used to code the app or project.
There are different types of mockups, and the tools you use will vary by type. Depending on what the client demands, these are possible options:
- Low-Fidelity mockups: Usually hand-drawn sketches of logos and project layout.
- Medium-Fidelity mockups: These include wireframes that offer a basic look at the project, with user interfaces, interactive links for navigation, and ideas for usability testing.
- High-Fidelity Mockups: Detailed prototypes that simulate the actual project and how it will work in real-time.
The mockup should follow the sitemap and wireframe, implementing details like the font size, platform conventions, and established design patterns. If the app is available on both mobile and PC platforms, you may need to create separate mockups for each.
5. Perform image optimization
For the best results, optimizing your images is crucial in the design process. When designing an app, website, or project, you may use up to 20 images.
If each of these images has a size of 5 MB, that’s a total of 100 MB that will need to be downloaded when trying to view the landing page.
The larger the images on a page, the slower the load speed and responsiveness. To optimize images, you must use the correct file format for various images. This means SVG for logos and icons, JPEG for photos, and PNG for transparent graphics.
Different options exist to automatically optimize images, including intelligent compression and responsive images.
6. Conduct user testing sessions
It doesn’t matter if you feel you’ve designed the best product; you still have to collect feedback from the end users.
There have been cases where users have had difficulty finding specific features or have been overwhelmed by the app’s features and navigation buttons (Discord).
To avoid these issues, it’s crucial that you allow users to test the project before full launch. These tests will help you get user feedback on how the navigation feels, load speeds, ease of accessibility, mobile user experience, and more.
You can host a post-test survey to gather user feedback, or use heat mapping software to get a clear picture of how users interact with your app or website. Popular heat mapping software you can find includes Smartlook, Mouseflow, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg.
Once you complete the usability testing and gather relevant feedback, you need to go back and address them. You may need to add new features, remove some of the previous ones, or rearrange the user flows to resolve all usability issues.
7. Perform a design handoff
The design handoff involves passing on the finalized project design to a developer.
However, there is a slight change in how this works if you’re taking on the role of a designer and developer on the same project. For unicorn developers, there is no visible handoff, but there is a transition from design to development.
How to simplify the design process?
As you transition from design to development, you may encounter some issues or hiccups. You can minimize these issues with a few tips, some of which we’ve listed here:
1. Take advantage of collaborative tools
While you may be the main developer on all projects, it’s crucial that you learn how to use tools like Adobe XD and Figma. These tools allow you work on the same project with other individuals, providing easy access to elements and assets.
2. Have a functional design system
Your design system is like a library that fuels your development. Here, you can store various elements, buttons, reusable code, and forms that you use frequently. A great design system is necessary for speeding up the development and design of new projects.
3. Pay attention to responsiveness
If you’re building a web app or website, you must account for various platforms. Therefore, your design and development must be optimized for various devices and screen sizes. This applies to the texts, images, and colors you use in the process.
4. Learn to communicate effectively
One of the reasons unicorn developers are great is that they’re not delayed by a communication gap between the design and development teams.
However, this doesn’t eliminate the need to communicate with the client or app testers. To ensure smooth communication, it’s a great idea to involve all relevant parties early in the design or development phase.
5. Design and develop for everyone
Nowadays, inclusivity is crucial for any successful design or development, so it makes sense to design with this in mind. Not only does this allow you cater to individuals with disabilities, but it also helps you meet various compliance requirements.
As you build for a larger audience, you’re also expanding your market reach, improving your brand reputation, and enhancing the overall user experience.
Conclusion
Design for developers is a great way to bridge the gap between UI design and development activities that are necessary for successful projects.
By allowing developers to take part in the visual design of projects, businesses can avoid issues that often arise, such as the impracticality of certain user interfaces.
With the option to choose unicorn developers for project development, you can maintain consistency in your design and development processes and ensure all user needs are met.