Dell uses Webflow to bridge the design-development gap

Dell’s Customer Experience design team delivers full-fidelity prototypes so their development team can implement designs faster, with less back and forth.
50+
Person design team
8
Different competitors evaluated
Industry
Industry
Software
Software
Country
Country
US
US
Company type
Company type
Enterprise
Enterprise
We had a software evaluation team look at eight different prototyping products over four to five months, and Webflow was the only one that checked all our boxes.
Tonda Dysart
Tonda Dysart
Design Systems, Dell
FOR TESTING PURPOSES

The challenge

Dell’s customer experience design team once used an internal component system to design and prototype solutions. But it took an entire product team to maintain it. And for a largely “non-technical” team of 50+ folks, it wasn’t what you’d call … friendly.

Tired of fighting this bloated system, the team started looking for something new.

Their needs

In short, the Dell team had a pretty straightforward set of needs:

  1. Better communication with developers
  2. Web and desktop prototyping — just mobile was not enough
  3. A code-free design tool

The search

A software evaluation team formed to put the available prototyping tools through their paces. After six months spent evaluating eight different tools, Webflow stood out for the precision and clarity it brought to their communication with engineering, since designers were handing off functional prototypes built with real code — not just pretty looking simulations.

Dell.com’s customer experience team manages their design system in Webflow, and delivers prototypes built with real HTML and CSS.

Adopting Webflow

Now, the design team starts every new project from a master Webflow template containing all the brand styles and components. From these raw materials, they build and publish prototypes to share with engineering.

From there, the engineering team can just inspect the code to get all the fine details — no more redlining needed.

Now that we’re building prototypes in Webflow, our design and engineering teams are starting to speak the same language.

– Tonda Dysart · DELL

Now there’s less back and forth between design and engineering, since now the design team can create all the front-end styling — from hover states to transitions to interactions — in Webflow, instead of “faking it” in a merely communicative prototyping tool.

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