The Best Handoff Is No Handoff
Design handoffs are inefficient and painful. They cause frustration, friction and a lot of back and forth. Can we avoid them altogether? Of course we can! Let’s see how to do just that.Many companies organize their workflows around projects and departments. Especially in large companies, work often travels from one place to another, often getting stuck between emails and Slack messages, and often “refined” on its never-ending journey between design and engineering teams. This inevitably brings up the question about the design hand-off: that magical moment when designers are done with their work and developer can take over. Most importantly, that’s where designers must stop working, and move on to other work — unless the scope changes or late adjustments creep their way in. The “No Handoff” Method Last week, I stumbled upon an interesting article about the no-handoff method, in which Shamsi Brinn shows an alternative to typical design hand-offs. Shandi shows a fluid model where product and engineering teams work on the product iteratively all the time, with functional prototyping being the central method of working together. With the process, the working prototype is the living spec of the project and a shared language for the team. No
