(Book Review) Designing with Your Developer in Mind, 1st Edition

Overview

Review Published: January, 2018.

From UX/UI Designer Kevin Tomasso, comes a guide to working in sync with Development teams across web-based projects.

From working within the design constraints imparted by various technologies, to communicating with your Dev team about specific technology choices, this guide is a crucial introduction for beginner-level UX designers and a great quick-reference for the more experienced pros.

Rating:

4.5 / 5

(Great Content/Presentation is Engaging)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Beginner (While it covers a lot of technical stuff, this guide is written for beginners and is very accessible).

Length:

129 pages.

Where to Buy It:

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What's Good

A comprehensive guide for UX designers about navigating web development realities; most early-career UX designers will find this guide essential for adapting their solution designs to the technical realities they need to deal with when “on-the-job”.
Provides additional reading & resources; several links are provided to learn more about the technical considerations introduced by the author (i.e. front-end frameworks, CSS shapes, Flexbox, etc.) for anyone looking to go further.
Very approachable and easy-to-understand; while this guide introduces several technical concepts, the author takes the time to present them simply and concisely.

What Can Be Improved

Focuses solely on web design; more a missed opportunity than a negative, this guide would made even better if it included the special considerations for working with a Dev team building a native app (i.e. in iOS or Android).
Email series that is drip-fed to you from InVision; this puts the burden on the reader to watch for and manage the content across several emails (Tip: Do yourself a favor and save all of the chapters to PDF for easier printing/reading).

The Bottom Line

A critical read that's surprisingly easy; while you can find a lot of this information across several other books, this guide provides a great condensing of the material into a concise guide.
For any UX designer looking to understand the realities of front-end web development; you’ll find yourself going back to this every time you start a new project to ensure a successful kick-off, and it helps to avoid costly design mistakes.
And it's free; every once in a while you get a truly valuable resource handed to you, so it would be plain silly not to have this in your library.