Not sure I entirely agree with the article but there is a good point in there about understanding the constraints that development is bound by. But it takes a lot for designers to become proficient enough to do what they need in code, just as the opposite is true with developers doing design.
I think whether it’s faster to code directly depends on many things:
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skills: as designers become more specialized in Ux and interaction design, code has become lower priority
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the design maturity of the project. Already have a design system with components and styles? Easy to whip up a page without sketching/doing mockups. Otherwise moving things around might be more difficult in code
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the needs of the team . Does getting html/css make the devs lives easier? Can code be shown to stakeholders? Can feedback be gathered easily? Can iterations be made? Compared? Tested?
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I’ve been doing this for the past years as freelance webdeveloper and designer. I can really make a difference with my clients in terms of speed. No more handovers from designer to developer. I just get a wireframe and out comes a working page. I do agree that in design programs you are not bound to limitations. I do see a trend in Figma limiting the freedom of designs by standardisation in turn for speed of design and development. But what use does Figma then hold in the end if you can just do it in code? Or are we going to let Figma create the responsive frontend instead of a frontender building it?
I guess that the latter is much more likely, that Figma will become the creation tool. That is the direction.
I tried a few tools as part of my job and to be honest the most useful one was by far Axure.
Design is amazing but end users also want to see and feel the user experience and it’s really time consuming to create prototypes in Figma / Adobe XD.
I’ve never actually used Axure before but looks interesting so may have to check it out.
I know what you mean about end users, a lot of the time they don’t understand what it means for their experience until they can actually use the product.
One frustrating thing that both design and development can have where I work are those clients who work exactly like that. They’ll agree and love designs that fit their requirements, and even agree with UX. But when it comes to actually using it want a lot of changes. We’ve found with those people it’s because prototype tools don’t give the experience they need to finalise a solid decision.
(I’m a developer by trade, but academically from a design background.)
With the new update Figma prototyping has become much better.
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