InVision on why it’s important for early collaboration between designers and developers

Hello, Atlassian Community!

I’m Jeff Hardison from InVision. Today, I’m sharing my thoughts on why it’s crucial for designers and developers to collaborate early and often along the life of a digital product.

If you’re not familiar with InVision, our design tools and educational resources are used by more than five million users to create powerful and engaging digital experiences. InVision and Atlassian have partnered to ensure that product teams have powerful, well-integrated tools to better work together--from ideation to shipping code.

I am excited to share some examples of how designers and developers can use Atlassian and InVision tools together today to streamline their workflows and have clearer context to make better product decisions.

What the best digital-product design teams share

When I interview companies about their digital-product design process, I often find they have one thing in common: Their designers and developers collaborate early and often along the life of a digital product.

In the most innovative companies, gone are the days of a designer “tossing a design over the wall” for a developer to implement. Today’s design-forward companies realize that persistent collaboration saves designers and developers time and headaches.

In collaborative environments, designers can voice context for their designs -- which can get lost in a “hand-off” environment -- and gain alignment for interaction ideas from those developers who will ultimately build them.

And, as developers start to explore all scenarios they need to cover, stretching the initial design solution can become very hacky without close collaboration. A developer weighing in early on design direction can help a designer make a design adjustment -- sometimes a solution might require only a small change -- that can avoid future engineering challenges.

Closer collaboration keeps the communication channel open during the whole process.

Some ways Atlassian and InVision support collaboration

In the past, designers and developers used Atlassian and InVision separately in various steps across the product lifecycle. A designer might have prototyped with InVision to show a developer how a design might play out in real life, before a developer had to lift a finger to help. And a developer might have created tickets in Jira about what they saw. Later, when the developer is building, they might have turned to InVision Inspect to receive specs (measurements, colors, etc.) for the designs.

With new, tighter integrations between InVision and Atlassian tools, these developers and designers can collaborate more quickly and easily throughout the complete product-design process.

Atlassian and InVision’s ultimate mission is to create one seamless workflow for designing and developing digital experiences. In the first phase of our partnership, we’re deepening our integrations between InVision and Atlassian products Jira Software, Confluence and Trello.

You can find an example of our deeper integration betow. As you can see in the example, Jira integrates with InVision, allowing a designer to “attach” the prototype directly to the ticket. From there, a developer can view and comment on the prototype. (Note: There are similar InVision integrations with Confluence and Trello.)

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Once the developer clicks on the InVision prototype, they’ll see another handy tool: Inspect. With Inspect, developers can access measurements, colors, and assets for desktop and mobile prototypes. Now, a developer can ensure they have the most up-to-date information as a design evolves.

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Once you can keep a live link between InVision and Atlassian tools, you avoid versioning problems and reduce a lot the manual work required to keep systems in sync. Not only is there less jumping around between tools, but now there’s also shared context to reduce misunderstandings.

We’re excited to partner with Atlassian to help product teams build more beautiful, transformative products. And there’s much more to come from our partnership.

If you’d like to try out InVision, you can sign up for free and learn about our Atlassian integration. For those who used the integrations, we’d love to read your experiences in the comments below!

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