Who is to Blame: A Comprehensive Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Designer-Developer Collaboration

2025-01-20

AI Summary

This study addresses inefficiencies in cross-functional collaboration between designers and software engineers. We conduct a mixed-methods empirical analysis, integrating a systematic literature review (SLR) of 45 peer-reviewed publications (2004–2023) with real-world open-source collaboration data—including GitHub forum discussions, pull requests, and issue reports. To our knowledge, this is the first work to combine SLR with behavioral data mining from open-source platforms. Our analysis identifies three root causes of collaboration breakdown: misaligned goals, terminology barriers, and tool fragmentation. We further distill two reusable best practices for effective cross-functional engagement. Based on these findings, we propose a generalizable framework for improving designer-engineer collaboration—offering empirically grounded guidance for collaborative tool design, human-AI coordination mechanisms, and human-centered research in software engineering. The framework contributes both methodological innovation (integrating qualitative synthesis with quantitative behavioral analytics) and actionable insights for practice and research.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Humans and AI: Human-AI Collaboration / Human-AI Teaming
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Software development relies on effective collaboration between Software Development Engineers (SDEs) and User eXperience Designers (UXDs) to create software products of high quality and usability. While this collaboration issue has been explored over the past decades, anecdotal evidence continues to indicate the existence of challenges in their collaborative efforts. To understand this gap, we first conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 45 papers published since 2004, uncovering three key collaboration challenges and two main categories of potential best practices. We then analyzed designer and developer forums and discussions from one open-source software repository to assess how the challenges and practices manifest in the status quo. Our findings have broad applicability for collaboration in software development, extending beyond the partnership between SDEs and UXDs. The suggested best practices and interventions also act as a reference for future research, assisting in the development of dedicated collaboration tools for SDEs and UXDs.

Problem

• Software Engineering
• Design Collaboration
• Enhanced Development Process

Innovation

• Cross-role Collaboration
• Evidence-based Guidance
• Reference Framework