How To Upgrade Your Designer-Developer Collaboration

When designers and developers join forces, amazing products happen.

But, ineffectively communicated ideas can often lead to hours of work wasted because your designer sees a feature and says, “wait, that’s not what I was imagining at all.”

If you have ever found yourself tired of going back and forth with designers, getting stuck understanding their intentions, then a high-fidelity prototype is the solution for you.

With a prototype, your designers can convey their intentions in a much more understandable way—and you can say goodbye to endless design specs documents.

Enter, ProtoPie.

Design collaboratively across teams with ProtoPie

We know that implementing design ideas is hard work, and engineers and developers have a lot on their plate. Deadlines looming, stakeholders to impress, and code to write.

As if that’s not hard enough:

• You are collaborating with designers whose creative visions you struggle to understand.
• On the other hand, designers may not be familiar with the intricacies and limitations of the tech.

That’s why we created ProtoPie—the easiest collaborative prototyping tool for turning your UI and UX design ideas into highly interactive, high-fidelity prototypes for mobile, desktop and web.

With ProtoPie, you have a powerful design collaboration software that helps cross-functional teams work together on design projects.

Your designers can easily build realistic prototypes without code, making it much much easier for you to understand and implement their ideas in the production stage. By adding ProtoPie to your design workflow, everyone in your team benefits.

But, you may ask—how exactly does ProtoPie make it easy for developers and engineers to manage collaborative design projects?

Here’s how.

How to solve design challenges faced by developers and engineers

Let’s dive into the specific challenges faced by developers and engineers in product design teams—and how ProtoPie helps solve them.

1. Speak the same language with designers using Interaction Recordings

For creatives and tech people, it can be hard to be on the same wavelength. While communication issues may be inevitable, it doesn’t have to make or break the success of your product design.

With ProtoPie’s interaction recordings, designers can record an intended scenario for the prototype that showcases the interaction specs you need to implement in the design development stage.

In the recordings, you can find interaction specs like:

• Duration
• Delay
• Easing

No more guesswork—just follow the interactions in the prototype and avoid starting from scratch on your next project.

2. Experience prototypes on real devices with ProtoPie Cloud & Player

To understand interaction designs, the best way is to experience them first hand—just like they would appear as a real product on actual devices.

But, with the static design prototypes of the past, you only had vague ideas to work with. We’re happy to say that’s no longer the case, because:

• ProtoPie Cloud allows you to interact with high-fidelity prototypes on any device—from desktop to mobile, tablet and TV.
• ProtoPie Player is a companion app for iOS and Android devices that lets you view, experience and test prototypes fully without the limitations of mobile and web browsers.

3. Gather everything in one place with Team & Project Spaces

No more piles of design specs where you have no idea which is the latest version. With ProtoPie’s Team & Project Spaces, you have access to all the prototypes of a project in a single space.

Using this feature, you can:

• Save prototypes inside every team space.
• Handle the prototypes as different projects in the Cloud.
• Leave comments on others’ works.
• Manage different versions of the prototype.

This way, every interaction design and prototype serve as your source of truth.

4. Go beyond a single screen with ProtoPie Connect

Today, people use multiple devices in their daily lives, and prototyping tools have to follow suit.

With ProtoPie Connect, designers can go beyond prototyping for a single screen. Now, they can create complex high-fidelity prototypes across multiple devices and displays that can communicate with each other.

This makes it much easier for engineers and developers to test prototypes in real devices, and understand how and what to do in terms of hardware integration.

5. Create custom plugins with ProtoPie Connect

This is where designers and engineers come together. With ProtoPie Connect’s Custom Plugins, you can:

• Make your designers’ prototypes integrate with any hardware and API.
• Quickly build a prototyping setup that works with multiple devices & displays, custom hardware and APIs.
• Customize your own plugins and create bridge apps.

Even hardware-software integration is easy peasy with ProtoPie.

A collaborative product design tool for every member of your team

When you add ProtoPie to your digital product design workflow, everyone in your team benefits.

Due to our team collaboration and interaction recording features, communication between your engineers, developers and UX/UI designers will run much more smoothly.

All the better for your team productivity—and the success of your product, of course.

Convincing the engineers

Need help convincing the dev team that ProtoPie is worth a try? We got it covered for you.

Discover ProtoPie is a collection of ProtoPie’s best Unique Selling Points, to help you persuade your stakeholders - developers, designers, product managers, and UX researchers from your organization - to get on board with ProtoPie. Share this Pie link with your dev team and help them discover how ProtoPie takes collaboration between designers and engineers to the next level.

ProtoPie helps you bring complex design ideas to life

Engineers and developers at more than 15,000 companies use ProtoPie as their go-to design collaboration tool. Book a demo to discover how we can help you.