When speaking of the disciplines of design and development, people tend to see them as different entities. As oil and water, rather than peanut butter and jelly. But we have some things in common – we both need to create new things, we both need a ton of creativity to get our work done, we both love finding awesome new solutions, we both love making gorgeous deliverables. We’re closer than you’d think. We could stand to learn a few things from each other.

Designers: become more technical.
Learn why things are or are not feasible before the developer even gets involved. Jump in and code some front-end interactions yourself – move the cycle along quicker and get your intentions across easier. Jump into some of the newer (awesomer) frameworks that make it easier to do the front end side of things. My favorites, jQuery and Ruby on Rails, can really make you feel like you actually know what you’re doing (and sometimes makes others think you know what you’re doing too). Once you see some of the amazing things that jQuery can do – it will open your eyes to tons of new interaction possibilities. And, in particular, jQuery will make you change the way you look at javascript (and use it).

Developers: learn UX methods.
Really, designers don’t bite, and we have some pretty awesome ways of figuring out problems. If you’ve run into an issue, sketch it out. What are the different possibilities? Visualize the solutions by sketching them out and find which one makes sense. Use that napkin that came with your take out or the whiteboard across the room. Don’t be afraid to come up with something stupid… it’s just as easy to toss it out if it doesn’t work – the only person that will know is the janitor, and she’s cool anyways. Remember Ockham’s Razor – all things being equal, the simplest solution is most likely the best solution. Less is more – just because you can do that extra feature, doesn’t mean its going to make the product more usable (most times its actually the opposite). Know that the best User Experience is one that the user doesn’t notice. If the user doesn’t even have to give the UI a second though, we’ve all done our jobs.

The better we understand each other, the quicker and more cohesively we can all work together to make a kickass product.