Think Like a Developer

You don't need to drop $12k on a coding bootcamp to start thinking like a developer. You just need to understand how they frame problems — and honestly, you're already closer than you think.

The big picture — front end vs back end

Developers are constantly cycling between two mental buckets: front end and back end. This framing shapes pretty much every decision they make.

Front end

This is what we're most familiar with as designers — the tangible, interactive layer:

• Representing the UI in code — that experience users actually see and touch
• Reacting to user input — clicks, form submissions, interactions
• Asking the backend for data — "give us the listings that match this search criteria"
• Ensuring accessibility — mobile responsiveness, cross-browser compatibility, screen readers, assistive tech

Back end

The back end is all about the stuff happening behind the scenes:

• Saving, retrieving, and deleting data — databases, schemas, data architecture
• Business logic — things like "every Friday, send a reminder email to all users" that aren't initiated by a user at all
• Authorization and authentication — making sure the right data is shown to the right users at the right time

A lot of times, the frontend initiates the conversation — someone submits a form, the data goes to the back end — but the back end is in charge of protecting that data and making sure it's not editable, updateable, or deletable by the wrong people at the wrong times.

These two buckets aren't siloed. They bleed into each other constantly — just like UI and UX do for us. But developers start here, and it frames everything else.

How developers actually think about your designs

Once that front end/back end framing is established, developers focus on three things: components, interactions, and data.

Components — we already think alike

Here's the thing — we've got this trend in design where everything is components. The crazy thing is, for developers, it's all components too. Especially on the front end.

Take a listing card on Airbnb. As a designer, you're thinking: image, title, rating, description, price — all auto-layout in Figma. A developer sees the exact same structure. They're just thinking about it in HTML instead of layers.

Look at a Figma layer list and look at the code. The organization is identical. They've got the image, a container for the content, a header group, the individual data fields — nested the exact same way.

We're already thinking in components. We just don't always communicate it explicitly. When you tell a developer "this should be a component in your pattern library," they're already thinking that way. You're just connecting the dots for everybody.

Interactions — where static mockups fall short

I'm guilty of this as much as anyone — deadline's coming, so you hand off static mockups and move on. But we're doing ourselves, our developers, and our users a huge disservice.

After identifying components, the next thing a developer thinks is: What are the variants? What are the states? How do we transition between them?

Take Airbnb's search interaction. There's the closed search bar, the expanded state, clicking each input. But notice something subtle — when you click the search bar, it prompts you straight to "Where." Once you select a location, it automatically moves to "Check in." That's not just component-level interaction — that's journey-level interaction.

This doesn't happen when a designer hands off static mockups. The design team had to think through:

• Component-level interactions — what happens when I click this button? What are the hover states?
• Journey-level interactions — what should happen after the user makes a selection? Where do they go next?

The best way to nail this? Sit down with the developer when they're ready to implement. Work through the interactions together. Tweak the easing in real time. Adjust what looked good in the mockup but doesn't work on mobile. I'd bet serious money the Airbnb team paired on their search interaction — it's too robust and well-considered to have been thrown over the wall.

Slack's notification logic is a great example of how complex interactions can get. Their engineering team has this massive decision tree just for when and how to show a notification badge. That level of detail doesn't come from static mockups — it comes from designers and developers thinking through every branch together.

Data — you're already doing this, you just don't know it

If you've been labeling your Figma layers correctly, you've probably already identified most of the data requirements for your components: image, title, rating, description, price.

Think about it — if you stripped away all the text and images from your designs, you'd just have boxes on a page. The content is the data. And a developer looks at that content and asks: "How are we gonna store all this? Where are we putting it so we can access it later, at the right time, for the right person?"

Think in spreadsheets

A really helpful bridge is to think in terms of spreadsheets. Take that listing card:

A developer sees this and thinks: "Great — that's my database table. Each field is a column, each listing is a row." If you did this for your developers, they'd love you forever.

Notice the data types matter too. What happens if half your components show prices with cents and half don't? That's design inconsistency that creates engineering headaches. Internal consistency in your designs directly translates to cleaner data models.

Data reusability

Once data is modeled, it gets reused throughout the experience. The listing card on search results and the individual listing page both show the title, rating, price, and description. Developers are always thinking: "How many times can we store this once and not duplicate it?"

If the card shows a truncated title and the detail page shows the full title, that's a harder engineering problem. If both use the same title field, the developer's life gets simpler. Thinking about data reusability while designing leads to better, more consistent designs.

Relationships

There's another layer — data relationships. A listing has reviews. Each review has content, a user, individual ratings, and belongs to exactly one listing. You can't have a review about two different properties.

In engineering, that's a one-to-many relationship — one listing, many reviews. As designers, we think about relationships all the time — "this card component belongs on the search page" — we just don't call them that as explicitly as engineers do.

When you're designing features like reviews, comments, or ratings, you're implicitly defining data relationships. Making those explicit helps your developers enormously.

The cheat sheet

Here are the questions to ask yourself on your next design project:

Framing

• Does this design impact the front end, the back end, or both?

Components

• Is this design as internally consistent as possible?
• Have I used as many components as possible?
• Is everything that could be a component actually a component?

Interactions

• What are the component-level interactions? Hover states, click states, transitions?
• What are the journey-level interactions? What happens after a button click — does a form submit? Does a toast show? What about errors?
• Have I communicated the transitions, not just the states?

Data

• What are the individual pieces of data in this design?
• What are the relationships between them?
• Who should have access to this data, and when? Should all users see the "delete workspace" button, or only admins?

Thinking like a developer doesn't mean writing code. It means understanding the questions they're going to ask when they see your designs — and answering them before they have to.