Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Vivienne Kay Illustration: Vivienne Kay

I recently looked 4 brilliant mobile developers in the eye(s) and confessed, “I just created another giant headache for you all.” But before the sobbing got too loud, I explained why.

It was an uncomfortable moment — my design decisions meant more work for the team. I had pivoted in light of new information (the final build would impact some screens’ layout), which triggered my gut-check questions for quality control:

• “Is this product something people will not just use, but love?”

• “Is the overall interaction experience something I feel proud of?”

• “Does this product maintain or raise the overall quality of what we expect our team to ship?”

In this case, the implementation details meant that the existing designs would no longer satisfy this criteria. So I decided to push for a higher standard.

While this was the right call for this situation (some tradeoffs were made but it didn’t set us back too far), I realized that my quality checklist was flawed. I needed to add another question to my list:

Am I balancing my efforts to achieve a high quality of user experience, with care and consideration for our maker’s quality of life?

This question is so critical to include, because the level of quality we’re able to achieve is a direct result of human effort. In other words, the quality of our process manifests in the final quality of our product.

If a team is frustrated and stressed (because designs and decisions keep changing, for example), the quality of the final product suffers. Seems fairly obvious; tired, cranky people are less likely to redo work for the sake of quality, make time for extra alignment meetings, or go that extra mile to polish and test the final feature.

Put another way, building a team or system that consistently produces high quality products doesn’t happen when we all focus solely on the end user — it also requires caring about the people who design, build, and influence those features. Caring about quality means putting equal emphasis on a seamless user experience, and a seamless (as possible) behind-the-scenes process of building that experience.

So what’s the most important step in creating a quality process behind-the-scenes? I believe it’s in working together to make key decisions. And when that’s not possible, taking the time to explain why certain decisions were made (or changed).

Everyone who influences a product has an equal stake in the final position of the quality bar. We also own the quality of relationships required to get us to the finish line.

Having said that, a quality process doesn’t mean shielding teammates from extra work because of last minute changes. Or not making changes for fear of creating extra stress. But it does require a collaborative decision making process where decisions can be discussed, challenged, and changed (and sometimes even changed again).

Specifically, I’ve learned that sharing a clear rationale for decisions is critical to maintaining trust. And this goes both ways — I’m wary of any engineer who hurriedly tells me my designs are “impossible because of [webhooks in the node.js caused by jargon on rails].” And I lose trust when I later discover (from other engineers, or the same person but in a better mood) that “impossible” actually meant “challenging but doable with extra effort.”

The best engineers explain their rationale in a logical, accessible, and patient manner. And they’re not afraid to whiteboard or re-explain things until everyone on the team is following along. Design should be no different — rationales for UX decisions can be layered and complex. But we need to be able to explain our thinking so that it can be challenged, influenced, and shaped by everyone responsible for crafting the final product.

When teams collaborate and iterate often, the quality of individuals’ skills also improves. These engineers are some of my greatest teachers — they help me learn about our back-end-systems, engineering processes, and mobile patterns. Their insights and questions also challenge me to be better at my craft as a UX designer.

Simply put, the end user experience (and overall quality of the final product) benefits from that extra alignment meeting you decided to schedule, or spending five more minutes white-boarding your thinking, or that candid conversation in the lunchroom.

Whenever possible, Shopify builds for the long term. Once our team launches this new feature we’ll iterate on it again in the future. Cultivating a high quality of care in our process will prime ourselves, and the work we produce together, for long term success.

Interested in learning more about our teams or working at Shopify? We’re hiring! Email me vivienne.kay@shopify.com or check out our spiffy careers page.

Also huge thanks to Ryan Bigge for adding snap and sizzle to a very rough draft of this article. 🙏

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Building quality products, and teams

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