03-10-2022
The end of Handoff: A short story
The following is a story that I shared on X (Twitter) back when I made the decision to quit Handoff.
A while ago, I’ve made the hard decision to quit Handoff, the design tool that translates to code. So... one more to add to the startup graveyard. 😅 A short story:
The dream for Handoff was to be a design tool that would fix the disconnect between design and engineering teams by allowing both teams to work in a single tool, on a single source of truth. We didn’t succeed to fix that disconnect, and here’s why:
For starters, fixing dev-design is a complex problem, and requires buy-in from both design and engineering teams. Problem with that is we were looking at totally different user personas who both wanted different features.
I tried listening to both of them, but as a result the scope of MVP quickly got out of hand. It’s the typical textbook example of a startup mistake not to make. But we did made that mistake.
I kept pushing for features to satisfy both dev and designers: Style tokens, component nesting, live code syncing, tactile canvas features, we went from left to right trying to increase user engagement. To no avail.
I did that because I was convinced our users needed to be both designers and developers. I was wrong. The reality was: I lost focus without even knowing it.
To correct course, we halted development and set up deep-dive interviews with some of our alpha users. But... the results were confusing.
Just like before, users told us they actually liked the tool and would see themselves using it. We only had to add feature “x” or “y”. But now, we didn’t trust those answers. Why didn’t they use our tool even though they liked it?
The answer to that lies in the way we did the interviews. Finding out underlying problems isn’t easy. Our previous interviews looked more like informal chats about dev-design. Users confirmed they had the problem, and we thought it was all fine and we could take it from there.
Wrong. We ended up with a blurry problem statement and no actual idea of what was the #1 problem to solve first. In our new interviews, it became clear devs and designers did see the value of Handoff, but for actually using it, they were pointing at each other!
Designers assumed Handoff was a tool that worked exactly like Figma. They’d just design like they used to, drawing rectangles, not worrying about what HTML tag to use or layout concepts like containers and Flexbox.
On the other hand, developers assumed Handoff was a tool for designers to work in. Devs just wanted to log in to copy over the code and be done with it.
However, for that to work, someone needs to prepare a design in a way that makes it suitable for the web. There’s only so much a tool can do to help with that.
The reality is that most designers don’t feel comfortable going much into implementation details. At least, not the ones who signed up for Handoff. This was a problem though, because without designer buy-in, the tool was also useless to developers.
The resistance we faced from designers lead me to question whether it’s actually desirable to have both designers and devs working from the same tool. Maybe their ways of working, priorities and requirements are just too different?
Maybe having designers work in a separate tool with more explorative freedom is actually an advantage? Or maybe the solution to this disconnect is more in conventions or frameworks? Or... maybe it’s just better collaboration?
Lots of unanswered questions. And unfortunately for us, a lot of insights came too late. Our mental energy and motivation was already burned on blazing out features.
Luckily, there’s many others in the industry that have a better shot at solving the disconnect between devs and designers. I’m really excited for what @webflow is doing for developers with DevLink, and the UX of publishing with @framer Sites is very promising.
So that’s it! Hit me up if you have any questions. I’m currently working on an exciting new project, more on that soon! 😁