How to Speak Unicorn
It seems that designers and developers speak different languages: developers are fluent in How, while designers are fluent in Why. Both are extremely important to a project, but this difference often leads to communication breakdowns. This talk will give developers insight into the design process, including vocabulary, problem-solving methods, and workflow, and outline some simple methods to avoid “fail points” along the way.
There are volumes of articles about how designers need to better understand development. You’ve probably seen dozens of them yourself. Developers go to great lengths to tell designers how they should name and organize their Photoshop documents, how things should (or shouldn’t) overlap, which font or icon libraries to use, even going so far as to request they learn many development skills themselves so that they can understand the hardships developers face.
What most of these articles fail to realize is: this is a two-way street.
Developers also need to understand some baseline design principles. Developers should be familiar with basic design language, user experience and interaction design, user interface fundamentals, and even basic design theory. Just a little bit of knowledge in the design domain can go a long way in building products that surprise and delight customers and users, and even further in forging strong and successful relationships with quality designers.
Whether you’re a developer or a designer looking to gain a better footing, you can learn a lot from this session.
Session Highlights
- Learn & Understand basic design language
- Become familiar with User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) principles
- Learn to build products designers will love (and sell to their clients)
- Forge stronger relationships with designers
- Get a better understanding of the user’s point of view
- Create experiences that will surprise and delight your customers and clients
- Solve the right problems