Process: Teamwork

Let’s imagine this scenario: A product team has gathered for a design review and the UX design lead on the team enthusiastically proclaims, “We need to make the user interface easier to use and more engaging!” Heads nod around the table. The product manager thinks in terms of simplifying the feature set, while from the visual designer’s perspective, this could mean adding modern visuals that are inspired by Framer templates. A developer might think about optimizing performance. Everyone leaves the meeting confident that they’re on the same page, only to discover weeks later that they’ve all conceived of different solutions, resulting in a product hodgepodge that misses the mark entirely.

Such misalignment happens far too often on product teams—more because of misalignment in understanding rather than because of over- or undercommunicating. We toss around fuzzy UX terms and grand design adjectives, assuming that everyone shares a common understanding. And they might to a certain extent. However, in reality, vague communication is the perfect breeding ground for misunderstanding. As George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” UX and product design professionals are quite familiar with this illusion. We might think we’ve clearly communicated our vision while each teammate has heard something different. Thus, in the everyday hustle of product development, vague language can undermine both team alignment and project success. Read More

This article was inspired by a discussion at last week’s Silicon Valley IxDA meeting, where Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong spoke on the topic “Sleepwalking + Designing for a Healthy Future,” which got me thinking about what qualities one must have to be an effective UX professional. So much of success derives from mindset rather than skillsets, and mindset takes a lifetime to develop—or, for those of us who believe in reincarnation, multiple lifetimes. Your mindset derives from your life experiences and the way you respond to them, as well as what you learn from those who influence you greatly—such as your parents, mentors, and spiritual teachers. Read More

When your organization’s goal is to differentiate on the experience, you must start every product-development project by defining the experience that you want people to have with your product or service. Companies that differentiate on the experience do not begin by defining feature sets. They first define a vision for the experience outcome that they intend to deliver to their users and customers. Only once your team fully understands the experience outcomes that you want users to have can you make good decisions about what features and technologies would optimally support that vision.

This is the fourth column in our series about what companies must do if they want to stop producing average user experiences and instead design great experiences. As we have already stated in our previous columns, great UX teams focus on differentiating their companies through design. If that’s your goal, you need to work for a company that shares your aspirations. Read More