To which extent is the designer responsible of a responsive design?

Question

Consider the following (idealized) chart.

Now, I have worked with colleagues from every side of this spectrum and have learnt that, unfortunately, it tends to be more like this.

Most "web developers" tend to know very little of design principles while, on the other hand, "web designers" tend to know very little of the technical side of the web. Well rounded "web crafters" are hard to find.

This unfortunate but real scenario makes creating a responsive website for a team of developers and designers a pain. Web designers tend to forget the site should adapt to every possible commercial device and often design rigid layouts that look great on their own screen but are impossible to turn into responsive websites. Developers, on the other hand, tend to make brutal adaptations of the designer's vision trying to achieve responsiveness.

Where should the responsibility of designing a responsive website fall? Should the web designer be expected to provide well thought guidelines for the developer on how to adapt the website for every possible scenario? Or is this an unreasonable expectation?

Please notice I am focusing on the design side of it, not on the developing side of it.

Answer 1

Where should the responsibility of designing a responsive website fall?

Typically on management. Smart management will realize it's a team project so everyone needs to be coordinated and working in tandem. This would include (but not limited to) visual design, UX, UI dev, back end dev, content team, marketing, etc.

Agile development is a good way to approach this.

Many organizations do not do this, of course, and tend to silo each of the above teams and use the old "toss it over the fence and don't worry about it" waterfall process.

Please notice I am focusing on the design side of it, not on the developing side of it.

That is the problem. You can't focus on one and not the other. The design of a responsive site is the development of a responsive site.

This is true of interaction design, in general. Interaction design (be it a responsive layout, a drop down menu, an animation, etc.) has to be designed in the medium it will be used in--the browser. This requires some level of development.

My ideal UX team structure would include the following roles*:

• Visual Designer and/or UI Designer
• UI Developer
• Content
• Research/User Testing

Now, that doesn't mean the UX Team's UI developer is the person writing production code, but they are writing working code to properly design, create, and test the interaction.

This is then shared with dev, and further work is done as a team to integrate it into the final responsive system goal.

* Said roles should include at least one of your 'web crafters'. I agree that they are sometimes harder to find, but they are a necessity on teams. You need at least one person that can communicate across the board and be able to talk to icon designers as well as DB admins.

Answer 2

Any well skilled designer is always going to be interested in implementation to a degree. Perhaps not in an "I can build it" aspect, but at least in a "that's not possible" aspect.

Whether a designer hits the far right side of your graph or not, they should always know what they can and can't do in any given medium. You can't design well for print if you don't understand separations. You can't design well for signage if you don't understand resolutions, etc.

I think any designer responsible for web materials should at least fall into this:

And I don't think it's as lopsided as your second graph.

The days where you can do a pretty mock up in Photoshop and simply hand it off are gone in my experience. In my experience, developers (meaning the left side of your graph) aren't really looking for someone on the far right. They are looking for a designer who at least understands what is possible and the restrictions necessary for designing well. This moves them from the far right, at least one tick left.

Are there still developers that hit the far left, absolutely. Just as there are still designers that hit the far right. However, a more important aspect may be experience. Are there developers/designers that hit the far left/right if they have 5, 8 or 10 years experience? I doubt it. The more experience one has the closer to the middle they get.

So perhaps this is more appropriate:

In a company structure you look for individuals to fill the far right/left position. This provides a solid basis for that desired skill set. However, I'd speculate that the more desirable a candidate is, the closer to the middle two images their skills fall.

Answer 3

While I agree with the mentality in DA01's answer, I think there is more to the question than just what he addresses.

The simple fact is that companies are organized in different ways due to the fact that they have people with different skills and vary in number of employees in each division. Each company needs to approach this decision with care and their company in mind in order to choose a good way of creating.

As such, I don't think there is one "best" way of making this decision or team structure. Each group of people is different and they what works for one company may not work for another, even if the structure and such are roughly the same.

With that being said, there are some general principles that apply to all companies when making these types of decisions:

• Make use of the skill set available - Some people work better in certain environments doing certain things. If something slows down the process greatly with little real benefit, it's likely not a good decision to make. That's not to say you shouldn't change because one person doesn't like the change, but it's important to keep in mind the preferences and abilities of the team in order to keep people enjoying their work and getting things done.

• Collaboration is key - Any designers and developers should be in communication and know approximately what the other is doing at every stage of the process, from talking to the client (however much is possible - seeing notes of the discussion or something similar might be sufficient sometimes) to the final implementation. One group is usually doing the work at one step, but the other(s) should at least know what's going on and have the ability to provide some sort of feedback at each stage.

  People's expertise varies, so we want people to catch potential problems that others wouldn't see as early as possible in addition to providing additional ideas.

• Direction over perfection - It's much better to know the goal and build towards that goal in direct but rough ways. By this I mean iteration is better than being pixel perfect for the mast majority of the process. We need to make sure we're headed in the right direction with each design decision and then refine that decision afterwards by iterating. By doing so, we can generally avoid bigger problems late in the process.

  Designing in the browser (or whatever medium the application is in) can help this be the case as it mixes the two jobs into one, forcing people to work together or have skills in both. Of course, it's important to keep the first principle listed here in mind.

Lastly, to directly address the issue at hand in one circumstance that the OP seems to be referencing, I'll say that if a complete separation of work is decided upon (complete separation of knowledge/feedback should not be done), then I recommend that the design team should create a small and large version, at least in most cases, and the rest is left to the developer. This forces the design team to keep in mind all the stages in between while not having to worry about the exact details.

Answer 4

There are some great answers here, but this really isn't that complicated.

Bottom line:

The design team (whether one or many) is responsible for every permutation of a view or template.

Do not ask the developer to fill in the blanks or lean on a framework.

Do your best at the outset and then shadow the dev as things progress. You'll have to make decisions as challenges arise. Sometimes it might be another mockup, other times it's best to provide some rough code (if you can).

Don't make Engineering do your job and they won't ask you to do theirs ;-)

Answer 5

Ideally, the designers own the design, plain and simple. If the designers are able to design a spec that is clear, relevant, and realistic, then it should remove guess work from the equation for web designers.

The job of a web designer is to translate the designer's vision into code. This can be easy if the spec is clear and the web designer is good, or it can be difficult if all the web designer gets is a .psd with the instructions 'do this.' Good specs mean more accurate implementations.

I'm going to skip web crafters, since I don't really work with that term.

Web developers shouldn't really deal with design in my experience. They typically focus on backend development and will only touch design if it is absolutely necessary. Most web developers I know don't really know CSS very well, and certainly don't use Photoshop.

Software Developer kind of encompasses 99% of developers. I wouldn't say that they don't design as in your graphic, but that's typically not part of the job description.

TL;DR: If designers come up with good specs, web designers should be able to handle the implementation easily.