Creating great users experiences and great products requires a lot of different hands with a lot of different skill sets. How many times have we tried to point the finger of failure at clients, de-scoping, developers, bad-design or bad management.
User Experience design is a team sport, it is everybody’s role to manage and contribute to the user experience of a product and to advocate for the approach. Stop pointing fingers!
Key Takeaways
Creating UX silos and encouraging design heroes doesn’t work anymore.
Create a culture of shared understanding; regular transparency and communication between ALL team members
Build UX principles into the team, use process to facilitate
Solve problems and measure success properly — stop building features, start solving problems
Team based UX creates shared ownership and mutual accountability.
Your clients or executives are part of that team, leverage their knowledge, get their buy in
The Problem: The UX Silo & Design Heroes
While silo-ing a user experience skill-set has worked and fits in to existing design and build organisational structures, the truth is that it is very hard to ‘manufacturing line’ quality user experience design. As soon as the ‘UX’ designer has done their job, numerous other people affect the product before it reaches customers. Without shared understanding, or early communication features are often de-scoped, removed or blundered as the rest of the manufacturing line try to make sense of another’s vision.
Design heroes are often the first to point the finger when their vision isn’t realised; they either take dictatorial control over other team member to make sure it is realised, or remove their hands completely.
The prevalence of ‘design-sprints’ and ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ methodologies are working on reducing the manufacturing line effect however without solid principles these methodologies are often abused.
Principles before Process
User experience is a human-centered mind-set, rather than a job description or a process. The processes and tools we use are to facilitate that mind-set throughout product development. The tools should not be used to ‘own’ or ‘do’ user experience. Each tool is designed to facilitate the conversation and build a shared understanding.
Ultimately the product is not a collection of wireframes and personas but the thing you ship, and the thing the customer experiences.
Create Shared Understanding
Having strong governing principles requires a shared understanding with every team member Sharing the user experience ownership with your team reduces the risk of uncertainty throughout.
Regular collaborating, sharing, measuring, testing, prioritising and estimating means everybody is on the same page throughout build. There are no surprise features, no surprise de-scoping and every team member has invested in the vision, creating shared ownership.
Focus on Solving Problems and Measuring Success
Creating a shared understanding and shared vision requires being rational about what your team and capacity can actually achieve. This requires them (designers especially) to focus on the outcomes of the design work rather than the output.
Focusing a team on solving problems and objectively measuring success regularly removes the burden of perfectionism, especially in teams where resource is limited.
Instead of using the delivery of a feature as a measurement of success, ask the questions:
Did we solve a customer’s problem? Did we make their experience better?Have we affected/improved a business outcome?
Your Clients are part of that team
Often with blame culture, as an individual, it is easy to pass on disappointment as the fault of other team members further down the production line or to direct it at clients or C-level organisation members.
When we talk about creating shared understanding, these people are part of your team too. Getting their buy in, agreement and understanding is just as important as the people actually building the product. These people also often have very unique insight and specialist understanding that can be leveraged by involving them early and regularly. Include them in your workshops, reviews and sprint plans, or at the least de-brief them.
If User Experience is Everybody’s Job, What is my job?
The role of the UX designer becomes facilitating this shared understanding throughout, using many of the tools and tricks we are already using. This helps us build a culture of mutual accountability rather than trying to place blame at the weakest point of the conveyor belt.
Empower your team, build great products.
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