Why enterprises need a
Design Delivery process

But, is your team’s product development workflow ensuring that developers are given exactly what they need to build toward? And does it allow your designer’s visions to be executed as it was intended?

In order to build great digital experiences, there needs to be an airtight handoff and two-way communication between design and development teams, or what we at Zeplin call Design Delivery.

There’s a lot of different skill sets at play in this process, and communication can be challenging with so many different styles and tools.

Zeplin was designed as a collaborative space that any stakeholder can easily understand.

Product teams that use Zeplin save an average of 10 hours per week per employee.

A smooth Design Delivery process benefits the entire team, the entire company, and the end-user.

Design Delivery boosts product teams’ speed and efficiency so they can ship quality products faster, helping them also fine-tune the product development process. It eliminates the need for verbal change requests and minimizes the challenges of working together with globally distributed teams. It helps clarify swim lanes and roles, which allows teams to maximize their skills and spend their time where it matters.

Design Delivery streamlines the designer-developer handoff and strengthens team collaboration. And automation and Styleguides significantly bring down the amount of time spent on QAing.

Finally, the improvements and standardizations across the entire workflow will be reflected in the quality of your products. Great design handoff improves the user experience of the final product, and it maintains consistency across brand assets.

When designers try to prepare their files for development using design tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD, elements get lost in translation, impacting the final product. Design tools are built for designers. Using design tools for handoff has major pitfalls.

1. Unfamiliar tools waste time
   Non-designers don’t have experience navigating these complex tools, so it creates bottlenecks and a lot of time spent trying to figure out a tool they don’t use daily. It’s like operating in an unfamiliar language.
2. Tracking feedback is highly manual
   Providing feedback (and keeping track of it) within massive design files is incredibly manual, and leads to bits of feedback falling through the cracks.
3. Live editing leads to chaos
   When designers continue to work on live design files and developers don’t know which design is final, it can lead to duplicate efforts, more back-and-forth, brand inconsistencies — and potentially even compliance issues.
4. Version control is challenging
   If developers send a design back to designers with feedback, the designers will need to send over another version with those changes implemented that shows the difference between the versions. It gets complex, very quickly!

All of these issues cause design work and development work to become more siloed — and that creates friction between teams. Poor collaboration can also lead to delayed timelines, duplicated efforts, and errors in development.

By adding a tool like Zeplin to the workflow between designers and developers, these problems are all avoided, giving everyone valuable time back in their days to work on the next project.

Enterprise product teams are constantly shipping new products, handling hundreds of files, working across timezones, departments, and skill sets, and generally trying to keep up with massive demand.

Highly skilled employees waste time going back and forth over email and Slack about versions, files, specs, and missing information. A Design Delivery solution centered around clear communication and quality control prevents these bumps in the road and promotes alignment, increased quality control and brand compliance, and room for scale.

When a developer is working on building a design, they’ll likely come across doubts and questions about a spec, a request, or a feature. “Why’d the designer want this drop-down to look like this?”

But, using a tool like Zeplin allows designers to maintain version control on a screen-by-screen level instead of a project level, incorporate the “why” behind a design with Annotations, and add the mapped-out user journeys with Flows. Commit messages even note what’s changed since the last version. Collaborative projects in Zeplin leave space for clear, organized feedback and teams are aligned better than ever before.

In fact, Zeplin helps improve team alignment by 94%.

Quality control is manual and tedious. Some teams have QA engineers whose whole job is to ensure that nothing breaks, but they’re typically not the only ones going back to check on designers’ and developers’ work. This process often involves manually extracting technical information and resolving doubts — again — over Slack and email, or in long lists of feedback.

These employees and teams could spend that additional QA time dreaming up, designing, or building your company’s next major innovation and running at your ambitious goals.

With Zeplin, the time-consuming and error-prone process of documenting things like regulatory language, design tokens, components, colors and spacing is automated.

Having disjointed handoff workflows leads to massive time waste as product managers, designers, developers, marketers, and many others end up spending more time confirming when a design is final than they do building great products. Scaling is almost impossible due to manual workflows, files transferred by hand, nontechnical workarounds, and bottlenecks at every turn. And to top it all off, deciphering design files is very challenging for non-designers. When there is a bridge between the design source of truth and the developer code base, collaboration is easier and design systems can scale.

In major companies, there are often dozens of links to manage per project. With Design Delivery using Zeplin, each project houses everything all together.

Design system rules and libraries need to be accessible and usable by every team, not just the design team, and Zeplin makes this happen. The design components will also be synced to the code system, meaning you’ll only have one source of truth between code and design, making growth even easier.

With simple, streamlined design handoff, teams can focus on what matters: valuing every employee’s skills and ensuring the product they create together meet and exceed their lofty goals.

Here’s how teams are addressing product development challenges using Zeplin