What are some good seminar topics that can be used to improve designer&developer communication?
- by tactoth
Hello guys the thing I'll tell is what happens in the company I work for but I know it's more like a common issue in software companies. I'm development team leader in a internet service company that provides service that's very similar to dropbox. In our company we have mainly two divisions: the tech division and the designers division, both have their own reporting hierarchy. Designers focus on designing UI and prioritizing features, while developers focus on implement designers' ideas (more like being driven as our big boss has said).
Then here comes our issue: the DEV team and DES team communicate very bad. DEV complain DES for these reasons:
Too frequent changing of requirements
Too complicated interaction (our DEV team has actually learned many HCI principles)
Documents for design are incomplete, usually you just get 'design principles' and it's up to DEV to complete design details. When you find design defects, you ask DES team to resolve them, then DES team quickly change the principles and you gonna spend another several weeks because the change is so fundamental.
While DES complain DEV for these reasons:
Code architecture is not good enough to adapt to changing requirements (Obviously DES knows something about software development)
Product design is about principles, not details. DEV fails to realize this.
Communication should be quick and should be mainly oral. Trying to make most feature discussion in document for reference is too overloaded and doesn't make sense.
As you can see, DEV and DES have different ideas on product design, and encourages very different practice. We have this difference because of the way we work. So our solution is that we should plan some seminars to make each part more aware of the way the other part work. Then my question is, what are some good topics for such seminars?
Guessing some people may not think seminars can solve this problem, please also suggest your solution.
