Design and development doesn’t have shortcuts
The most important note to make here is that there are no shortcuts. Nobody can skimp out on design or development time and have it go unnoticed.
While we can stick to common use cases and implement popular code libraries to solve the problems of today most, if not all, products stand to benefit from some one on one attention in both design and development.
Rapid design and development methodologies are taking the traditionally more custom approach in these areas and cutting things down to be revisited later. It’s expected that products are revisited to give the proper attention to design, and to optimize or even run with a more custom developed solution. So while we can save on time and resources today by taking a more rapid or agile approach to our workflow, it should always be with the expectation that we revisit things after the fact to ensure our work is solid.
Once the core is complete, revisit and customize. When the next round of non-essential features are complete, revisit and customize. Generally, this only requires front-end work and not a complete redevelopment of the back end code. So it’s typically limited to the positioning, color, size, or other aesthetic attributes of elements. Development wise, revisiting here simply means optimizing code to run for performance.
Tick, tock goes the cycle
Going with a “tick, tock” style cycle for revisiting our rapid design and development solutions is the best way to approach revisiting in my experience. While development is working on fleshing out the next batch of features, design can review the last batch to make sure everything holds up or vice versa. At any given time, either design or development is one cycle ahead of the other, and the other is reviewing. During this process, both teams work together not only to review, but also to push out the next batch as well.
Rapid design methodologies are hard
Development can usually get by with using existing libraries or open source solutions to flesh out product ideas. But when it comes to design, it’s much harder to cut things back or outsource them to existing solutions.
Design by nature is more one-on-one than development and if you’re in a niche industry it’s going to be hard, if not impossible, to find similar use cases to base work on. Design is one of those areas where the more you cut out, the more quality you’re going to lose in the end. User experience and aesthetics play a very large role in how well a product “works”.