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In a digital product, a well–crafted screen or component is one that embodies the personality and brand of the product. It wordlessly guides users to achieve their desired outcome. It also subtly evokes an emotional response, like “I’m a serious, trustworthy but approachable banking app” or “I’m a language learning app, but I’m quite fun”.

A well-crafted product can stand out among its competitors. While another product helps users “gets things done” yours “gets things done, and I enjoy it for some reason.’

“Designer-magic”

When designers work on visual craftsmanship, they use the building blocks of the trade — the visual material. Space, form (shape, image, typography) and colour. These they compose in creative and clever ways using Gestalt principles (similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure-ground, and symmetry), hierarchy of information (based on intended purpose of the screen) and visual hygiene (pixel perfect alignment). This is of course simplification of the process.

Designers have expertise in this process and are naturally the right people to ensure visual craftsmanship (among other things). But they shouldn’t have to be the only ones upholding it. I’ve often seen hastily made presentation decks and internal builds handed off to designers by their cross-functional peers with a request to add their “designer magic”.

While it’s almost always meant as a compliment, it also casually dumps all the responsibility of ensuring visual craftsmanship of a product solely on the designers.

Co-ownership doesn’t need expertise

The designer in the team is an expert in visual craftsmanship thanks to their years of training, practice, iteration and analysis of other well-crafted products. But they’re not gatekeepers. By empowering cross-functional peers to learn what good and bad craftsmanship looks like, the team is in a better place to build good products. Teams will also feel more empowered about their ownership and move on quicker to collaborating on the more complex problems.

Knowing good visual design practices helps the cross-functional team in their other day-to-day work too. Many UI bugs will never get filed because they’re already fixed. Engineering and PM decks will be cleaner and more impactful and experience reviews of products will be more intentional.

Here are 7 tips on how designers can bring a culture of craft-ownership in the product team.

Tips to build a culture of craftsmanship:

1. Answer as many questions you can, before they’re asked

Treat the design-handoff meeting as a storytelling exercise. Proactively state user context, business need and your rationale behind your approach to solve for it. This way, you build up the story in your audience’s mind towards the seemingly natural conclusion — your final solution.

A trick to get everyone on the same page is to introduce the ‘Jobs to be Done’ statements you’re solving for, at the very beginning.

It’s a great tool to help people put themselves in the shoes of a specific user, in a specific situation who’s hoping to get a specific outcome. A lot of questions in the audience’s minds melt away even before you begin.

2. Defending decisions ≠ being defensive

As the creator of the design solution, you gathered context, understood nuances and have done the due diligence of iterating options before you finalised the proposed solution. You also most likely had a bunch of reviews with fellow designers and mentors. So when you’re handing off your design to the product team, it’s natural to feel impatient when you’re asked “why this colour?” or hear a colleague spend 5 minutes sharing an idea that you’ve already tried out and discarded for good reason.

My advice is to be patient and repeat the answers. Avoid jargon, articulate the obvious and give examples where your approach worked. Also be open to changes if they make sense and be vocal about their value.

While this seems tough, it helps build the team’s trust in your process. Questions and discussions also mean that the team is genuinely invested in building a product they believe in. Eventually, someday you might see your engineer or PM passionately and correctly explain the rationale behind a design decision to a key stakeholder or leader. It’s absolutely worth it.

3. Tell your teammates you trust their eye

Find subtle ways to build your team’s confidence in craftsmanship. For example, I’d tell my engineers that I’ll do a UI review once they’re confident they’ve caught & fixed all the obvious visual bugs in the build. This makes them mindful of visual discrepancies and establishes their co-ownership of the visual quality of the product.

4. Talk-aloud, collaborative bug bash sessions

Closer to release, I suggest sitting with your engineer for dedicated time to find and fix styling bugs. The key element is that both of you talk aloud about what you see and think. While you learn about the tech constraints and get cleverer with solving for them, your engineer will be better able to see visual discrepancies and fix them on their own in the future.

5. Encourage constructive conversations on design

Lunchtime debates can start including design if they don’t already. You could mention a competitor’s recent app icon redesign and ask what everyone thinks. By listening without judgement, you’re building a safe space for them to voice their opinions. You can also help them form stronger opinions by asking them why they feel strongly about a choice of colour or shape. Offer them possible reasons if they get stuck — “Is it because the contrast is too low?”

When you share your own opinion on someone else’s design, always give the reasons for your opinion. This implies that visual design isn’t an act of self-expression.

6. Share literature about design

Keep sharing articles, talks and books about design processes and best practices with your cross-functional team. Someone’s bound to find it interesting and use it. In my product team at Microsoft, we had a Teams channel where engineers shared tech-heavy reading material. Now it also contains design topics. And it’s affirming to see how some even spark conversation in the team.

7. Don’t expect instant culture shifts. But keep at it.

By opening up the nuances of design to non-designers, you’re making collaboration easier, product ownership stronger and helping everyone appreciate and utilise design practices to their own benefit.

As is true with all culture-shifts, don’t let radio silence get you down. Someone’s definitely listening in.