6 benefits of Design Delivery for enterprise companies
Design Delivery
Zeplin Crew
Aug 2022@zeplin
Design handoff is one of the most time-consuming and critical steps of the creation process. After designers send their work over to the development and engineering teams to build and bring it to life, they frequently run into challenges. 65% of developers spend 4-8 hours each week interpreting design files, and 66% of designers spend 4-8 hours per week explaining them. 🤯 A few challenges resulting from inefficient design handoff include:
Unclear design intention
Difficulty ensuring version control
Frequent miscommunications between design and development
The challenges of design handoff are motivating designers and developers alike to find a process that allows them to seamlessly transfer and access final designs in an easy and simple way. At Zeplin, we call this Design Delivery. Design Delivery offers a way of streamlining design handoff, solving these challenges, and saving huge amounts of time.
What is Design Delivery and why is it important?
Design Delivery is about more than just handoff — it helps everyone on the team understand the “why” behind design choices, facilitating better relationships between design, engineering, and product teams. To build incredible, delightful experiences quickly and efficiently, Design Delivery is key. With Zeplin, the entire team works together using a common shared language and a single source of truth between design and development.
The same design system used by the design team is extended to the development team, helping developers understand design parameters and rules instantly. Regularly used code snippets are attached to their corresponding design elements (hello, CTA button!), making the entire development process much faster. With a shared language, designers and developers can easily communicate within the platform, streamlining the entire process and saving hours of time for both teams.
6 benefits of Design Delivery for enterprises:
For large-scale enterprises, the time saved and problems solved through Design Delivery are a complete game-changer. All of the benefits of Design Delivery are experienced on a much larger scale, helping enterprises deliver delightful user experiences quickly, seamlessly, and efficiently. 🚀 Benefits of Design Delivery range all the way from well-defined design intention to consistent branding across assets. Let’s dive into the top 6 benefits of Design Delivery for enterprises.
1. Boosts speed and efficiency with clear design intention
One of the biggest benefits of Design Delivery with Zeplin is clear design intention.
For example, documenting user journeys is often manual and time-consuming for designers. They might use workarounds, like creating a design layer to draw user paths. However, for complex projects that can require constant maintenance. With Flows in Zeplin, designers can use connectors, labels, and shapes that automatically snap into place and dynamically adjust as screens are added or removed.
“What remains to be really clear to us in our experience and our workflows is that Zeplin’s just been a really key contributor for us to move at a really meaningful velocity in our in our work and for our clients.”
Lara Horowitz,Creative Director, Organic
2. Streamlines handoff between designers and developers
With Design Delivery, not only can designers easily demonstrate design intent for developers, but both can comment on the design as it evolves. Comments on specific areas of the design allow for quick and efficient communications throughout the creation process. Developers can easily gain clarity on specific areas of the design without the question getting lost in email — and afterward, the comment is there for the rest of the team to see and understand. When teams are big, this sort of clarity makes designer-developer collaboration across the product development lifecycle that much smoother.
“I can comment in the Zeplin project, and the designers can respond, and we can have a whole discussion. So when we deploy the app, the product manager isn’t looking at the app going, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t what I meant,’ because they were part of that conversation. This solved a lot of our pain points and made us become productive quickly.”
Chris Richards,Sr. Software Engineer at PepsiCo
3. Designers don’t have to train developers on design platforms
Without a platform for Design Delivery, developers are left to navigate design files within the complicated design software the design team uses. For developers unfamiliar with the tools and functionality of these platforms, navigating between artboards and determining design intention can be incredibly difficult. With Zeplin, rather than training developers on design software, developers can intuitively use the platform to navigate between design files.
Not only is Zeplin’s Design Delivery platform simple to navigate, but the developers’ codebase is seamlessly integrated into the design system. When looking at design files, this single source of truth between design and code instantly suggests code snippets that pair with design elements, allowing developers to scope the project quickly and easily. This saves hours of time and resources typically spent on training developers on tech they don’t need and helps new developers onboard faster.
“I think of pre-Zeplin days spending hours documenting complex design notes to pass off to multiple different audiences. Being able to spend more time designing and collaborating with team members has opened up a more optimal process for the entire team.”
Lara Horowitz,Creative Director, Organic
4. Improves the user experience
When 90% of users will stop using an app due to poor performance, developing a product with quality UX is essential. Zeplin’s Design Delivery platform creates a seamless language for both designs and code with a design system, which heavily impacts the final UX. When designers and developers are on the same page, working with minimal roadblocks, they’re able to focus on the UI/UX rather than spending hours trying to understand one another. Zeplin’s single source of truth allows both teams to work together seamlessly, resulting in a final UX that’s driven and built by both design and development.
Quality user experience begins with a high-quality user interface. Creating a strong UI, however, begins with airtight Design Delivery, ensuring both teams are on the same page. For example, when developers are presented with a finalized design, complete with clear design intent and direction, they can immediately begin focusing on how well the UI works. This results in an overall better end experience for the user.
5. Maintains consistency across brand assets
Design Delivery doesn’t just ensure continuity across one product, but across all designs for the entire brand. For large-scale enterprises, this is absolutely key — when creating multiple products, platforms, and more across varied teams, maintaining continuity and brand standards is crucial. With Zeplin, this consistency is easy. The design system in the platform acts as a single source of truth for all teams, allowing teams across the company to work within the same system.
For example, the teams creating the brand’s website and the teams creating the brand’s app both work within the same design system on Zeplin. The designers are automatically pulling from the same pool of design elements to ensure consistency across platforms. With Design Delivery, teams can ensure brand consistency without repeated check-ins.
6. Improves quality control and saves valuable time
Not only should designs be consistent, but they need to be high-quality. With Zeplin, Design Delivery ensures both teams are working within brand parameters and using elements they already know work. Zeplin limits the time needed for QA by automating the time-consuming process of documenting design tokens, components, colors, and spacing. 🤯 All that additional time spent in QA ensuring the final product is up to standards can now be spent on dreaming up new, exciting products and improvements that users will love.
“We have constant communication throughout the design process so everyone knows what cards are on the table and what the process constraints are. This is so we are able to deliver the best product possible, and not just deliver something that’s done.”
Daniel Pereira,Front End Developer, Pixelmatters
Final thoughts
Zeplin’s Design Delivery platform saves valuable time and resources for enterprises — meaning your teams can get back to creating the innovative experiences you hired them for instead of smoothing over internal miscommunications. Seamless collaboration through a shared language and clear communication means your products reach your target market faster and with better quality than ever.
Want to learn more about Zeplin’s Design Delivery platform? Get in touch and discover why enterprises love Zeplin.
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