Engineers don't hate designers
They hate designers who don't understand technical constraints
A designer once asked me why engineering kept “making excuses” about her designs.
I looked at her specs. She wanted a feature that required rebuilding the entire data model.
She thought engineers were being difficult, while engineers thought she didn’t respect their time.
Here’s what 15 years taught me: engineers don’t wake up trying to ruin your designs.
They wake up trying to ship working software on schedule.
When you hand them a design that ignores the existing component library, you’re asking them to choose between your vision and their deadline.
When you specify interactions without understanding API response times, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.
The designers I see thrive are the ones who ask engineers, “what’s hard about this?” before finalizing designs.
They understand that beautiful gradients might break accessibility. That custom animations might destroy mobile performance.
They don’t need to code.
They need to respect that code has consequences.
So, next time when an engineer pushes back on your design, don’t assume they’re being negative or difficult. Ask them to explain the constraint.
You might learn something that makes you a better product designer.
Originally published here.
I am a designer who struggles for years with different engineers (not all). They refuse the designs/solutions immediately without sharing with us that type of challenges u mentioned.
They compare our solutions to theirs. They challenge the ux because they assume that all users are stupid if they didn't use their solutions the way they expected.
I agree that some designers used to work in silos with no prior collaboration with engineers but when we work together we need to find a middle point to listen to each other.
The solution team needs to teach each other's their jargon and challenges. In my team, we've been there, working then fighting for our solutions. Once we both open up to share our thoughts and pains, we agreed to share more about the "NO" word. Now, we are together building the solutions that will work for business, users, engineers.