Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 12]

Let’s take a look back to Day 3 where we talked about kicking off the project with Design Thinking and the importance of including a multi-disciplinary team. If we kicked off the project like this why shouldn’t we continue? That’s because it’s hard, collaboration is hard. It’s very easy for us to sit behind our screen alone, take the ideas, validate our assumptions and present the findings and eventually our final wires/designs to the team. But why is it important to encourage cross-functional collaboration at every stage of the project? Basically I see it as a win-win-win situation; for you, for the product and for the team.

For you

Let’s admit it, we have all been there at the end of the hard work, designs ‘finalised,’ about to implement with developers when your design decisions are questioned. It can often feel like a hostile situation with feelings of mistrust and becoming a battle over who gets final decision. We know that we don’t make design decisions based on our feelings and tastes but based on the best way to solve our user needs, as designers we have spent hours determining the best hierarchy, the best CTA… etc. but from the outside if an individual sees a final design without understanding the thought process it’s very easy to critique, even if we create killer decks and presentations of our final designs with the research it’s extremely hard is to summarise and justify every design decision you made. It’s stress we just don’t need (nor have time for)

It’s my belief that involving the wider team from the beginning, inviting them to user interviews, sharing updates, informing them of the design process, encouraging feedback at every sketch is fundamental to minimising these types of conflicts. The team will understand why you are making certain design decisions and it becomes less about personal opinions and more about finding the best way to solve for our user.

For the product

Finding it hard to convince your back-end-developer to attend user interviews? Your not the only one. Getting the full team involved in Design thinking, user research and sketching ideas is a battle on it’s own, but it’s the most rewarding when it works. I once worked with a team that were very reluctant to join me and my sticky notes and questioned the hours spent away from their screen to listen to users. Getting them to join was difficult at the beginning. After a few months it became normal to have a back-end-engineer remind me (the designer) of our upcoming user test and to answer for me when questioned why to attend research sessions by new developers joining the team. It gave me a sense of sheer collaboration we are all finally in this together, working towards a common goal, to solve our user needs with the best solutions. By providing an environment for collaboration everyone can share their ideas and opinions on how to solve for user needs, we know that different perspectives will truly allow us to find the best solutions it will also allow us to align as a team and fundamentally, ship great products!

For the team

And lastly it’s for the team. Gabi mentioned on Day 3 that through collaboration and Design thinking the “team will brainstorm together, create empathy for the user & create empathy for each other.” We all know the importance of team events to strengthen the relationships on a team but also through collaborating on a daily basis you can build an atmosphere of trust and union.

How?

But how do you involve the team? When is appropriate an how can I start to introduce an environment of collaboration? Here are some quick ideas to help you get started at the early stages of the project (during the research phase):

When performing formal usability testing invite the full team to watch from another room, buy lunch and watch the reactions together. 🙂
Have a live screening to the interviews for some to watch from their desk.
Create a usability lab in the office where you can screen the interviews in another room, this way they don’t even have to leave the office
When doing contextual enquiries, take along a different colleague at a time to take notes and observe.
Share your design process in the daily stand ups. What are you actually doing and why. “I am working on designing a new CTA for adding photo’s as we saw in user testing they don’t understand it or miss it completely” vs. “I’m working on the designs for the new photo CTA”
Share all wire frames and concepts with the team and link it back to where the ideas came from (The Design Thinking workshop we did together, the user interview we did) This way it’s no longer the designers idea but something the designer materialised based on the team work.

What are some ways you involve the team? Let us know your team experiences and even share some conflicts you had, how did you solve them? What did you learn?

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Rochelle Carr — UX Designer, Placing customer journey team, Marktplaats, Ebay. Soft spot for red wine & tries to learn Dutch in her spare time.

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

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Cross-functional Collaboration

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