Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sawyer Zhang

Product Design is hard.

Especially when change happens. whenever this is a change in the up flows, there are cascading changes to the down flows. And all the changes collectively pose great challenges to the team in aspects of collaborating, responsibility and morale.

It may feel tempting to blame your up-flow, but it never helps. Instead of resisting changes we should accept the fact that change are inevitable, and what we can do is to react fast to changes.

How? In this series of blogs, I want to share my perspectives of the Delivery aspect of Product Design, and how a better defined Deliverable can help the team react faster.

Let’s first take a look at the typical role in a team.

A Product Designer
A Visual Designer
A Copywriter
A Developer
A Devops

In this blog, Let’s take a closer look at Project Designer and try to find out how s/he can deliver better.

Use digital tool for taking notes

As a Product Designer, s/he actively talks to everyone everyday. Changes come from basically every key person form the team, how to quickly visualize requirements becomes critical. I know that it feels most nature to use pencil and paper but I do recommend using a digital tool such as Surface Pro or iPad Pro, because you can

Take it with you whenever you want to talk to anyone.
Quickly draw and erase to communicate.
Save it online and share instantly.

Speak of User Story

Different team members focus on various aspects, speak of different languages. But one common languages everyone understand is User Story. The Product Designer should extract User Stories from any researches, meetings, and any changes would be able to fall into one particular User Story.

Maintain the design of flow

Gradually we would realize the Product is not a simple linear combination of User Stories, instead it becomes a mesh network where each User Stories intersects with each other like this:

https://dribbble.com/shots/3203068-Adobe-XD-prototype

And not long before it’s out of control and basically not maintainable and not possible for your down-flow to easily understand. So instead of deliver a whole design file, you should deliver individual user flow which could corresponds to one User Story.

Modao is the best tool I can find in the market for you to maintain user flow.(Pay attention to the right panel, where you can define individual user flow)

https://mockingbot.com/

Use prototype to achieve team consensus

People are naturally visual, a mid-to-high fidelity prototype containing the right wording, color and animation can facilitate information flow. So it’s wildly used externally for a team to perform Usability Testing or get Sign-off from stakeholders/clients.

And it can also be very useful when changes happen and you want to achieve consensus inside the team. A screenshot of your prototype with comments or a Gif can easily pull it off.

That is pretty much what I can think of for now, I’ll keep updating this blog if I found something new. Hope it helps. 🙂

How can we deliver better as a team(1)? was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How can we deliver better as a team(1)?

Cool stuff, every week

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