Moving designers away and waking Applications up to their addiction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
There are business discussions and design plans in the works about migrating designers away from cloud based tools that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many designers may be oblivious to this but Sketch (Cloud), InVision and Zeplin all rely upon Amazon Cloud services.
I thought that breaking the risks down to which form of communication has the capability of being compromised would be a constructive way to begin considering alternatives. I’ve also elicited input from our app design team should they have any additional considerations. Hope you find it at least entertaining, if not informative and helpful to enter into our world a little.
—
There are five key forms of communication taking place that these tools are used for which guarantee that business requirements are met and it is imperative that we weigh the risks to each form of communication accordingly.
Designer to developer communication, designer to designer communication, designer to business stakeholder communication, design researcher to customer/user communication, and business stakeholder to executive sign-off communication.
All parts of the business suffer when any of these types of communication is compromised or require loop-holes and work-arounds for a communication to be made:
Designer To Developer Communication:
In terms of developer-designer communication and implementation, the only two tools that make handoff efficient, time effective and allow for some degree of quality control are InVision (inspector) and Zeplin (both however do run on AWS). Any other level of hand-off communication requires extensive additional documentation, extensive additional hand-holding between design and development.
These tools make the hand-off painless and timely — freeing the designer and developer up to invest their time and energies into performing design and development tasks instead of over communicating in order to ensure that basic implementation requirements are adhered to and understood.
I don’t know of any replacement for either of these two that wouldn’t require an extensive amount of additional training as well as a funded migration plan/reorientation plan designed to reengineer team processes with huge time-losses and hits to productivity levels.
Designer To Designer Communication:
When it comes to designer to designer communication, Sketch (Cloud), InVision DSM, InVision (inspect) and Zeplin all act as qualitative tools for ensuring that team communication is made, version control is respected and that reusable components, font styles, color systems and other styling information is accurately communicated, documented and current.
Design Researcher To Customer/User Communication:
Design researchers are comfortable testing using prototyping environments other than InVision and will often remain flexible to the demoing environment of choice based upon the type of device-level interactions that need to be understood or observed and the type of observation research that needs to be performed. InVision is not a requirement for this, we have alternatives.
Designer To Business Stakeholder Communication:
During demos, proofing and concept reviews, InVision acts as an industry supported prototyping tool. There are however other alternatives to this type of communication that don’t necessarily require cloud-based communication and can be done at the local-device or machine level.
Business Stakeholder to Executive Sign-Off communication:
When business stakeholders and executives need to build consensus around a research direction or finalize upon whether all of the business needs are being met within a prototype, InVision inspect is frequently used to make sure executive and business communication is made. I am unaware of other tools on the market which provide pixel-level annotation and stakeholder commenting with the level of accuracy and savings that InVision inspect provides to this form of communication.
