Improving Collaboration Efficiency Between UX/UI Designers and Developers in a Low-Code Platform

Abstract

Customer-facing applications are essential for businesses. Therefore, a good user experience is fundamental for their success in the market. Companies employ highly specialized people in front-end development and User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) design to achieve this goal. Their collaboration is critical and raises some efficiency challenges, particularly in Low-Code platforms, such as OutSystems. UX/UI designers typically use specialized tools with their underlying metamodels. OutSystems developers use an integrated development environment with the underlying OutSystems metamodel. While there are some code-generation plugins for popular design tools, these do not generate code for Low-Code platforms. The current transformation process from design to development is done 100% manually, resulting in a loss of efficiency. Our goal is to accelerate this transformation process from a design model to a development model to mitigate this inefficiency. To do so, we developed an approach using model transformations to automate part of the process. Namely, it automates the generation of application pages/screens by composing the screen mockups in a design technology (such as Figma or Sketch) with a library of reusable UI components to instantiate the design in a front-end technology (such as OutSystems). Our approach was validated by a professional team of frontend developers from an established enterprise-grade Low-Code platform who applied and evaluated this work on some of their past real projects. Preliminary results show an overall acceptance of the developed tool with a possible increase of 150% to 400% in the number of pages/screens that they can deliver with the same effort. This approach allows mitigating a bottleneck faced by the development team. To increase the value they could offer to customers (e.g., by producing more application screens in the same time frame), they would need to recruit new collaborators whose skill set is high on demand. Our work offers a more economical alternative to increase their productivity.