Stop, collaborate and listen

One theme that emerged clearly from the diverse talks at this week's cxpartners conference was collaboration; collaboration with our clients, with project sponsors and stakeholders, between project teams.

There was much talk about how – whether as individuals or small teams – we’re often just one component of a larger end-to-end process. I heard lots of brilliant ideas about how to make that process as smooth as possible and make the final outcomes better.

And what came shining through is just how much everyone here is motivated to achieve the best possible outcome for our clients’ users. It’s simply not enough to create concepts or design pie in the sky experiences. As practitioners, our job satisfaction comes from influencing an outcome, from using our skills and experience to change something for the better.

So while leanness wasn’t an explicit topic, it’s clearly running deep in everyone’s thoughts right now, through UX, design and development. Lots of the chat centred around focussing on value rather than fixating on deliverables.

Here are my takeaways from the day, along with a bit of commentary:

You need great relationships to be agile

Our Research Director, James Lang, described how – when we have the trust of project sponsors – we can react to insights acquired in flight and remodel our outputs, to deliver more impact than would have been the case by following the pre-determined plan.

Trust comes from great, collaborative relationships that are built on honest and open communication.

Minimise the cost of changes

Senior UX Consultant, Stu Tayler, talked about regularly adjusting the iterative design process for the Co-operative Bank, in this case, to minimise the cost of changes when turning an idea into first low and then high fidelity designs.

This line of thinking is never more relevant than when code is introduced. Don’t forget it when making that all important call about whether to design in the browser.

Hire wide-lens designers

Senior Designer, Yunmie’s talk focused on Maximising efficiency, based on her experience of an international e-commerce redesign project on which she and UX Consultant, Mia, had a tight deadline and no access to the client’s development team.

We know that siloed working encourages people to view the project through a narrow lens, and consider their work as a project in its own right. That can mean putting more emphasis on wowing stakeholders with beguiling designs than creating something that can be realised within the constraints of the project and the technical platform. This is the antithesis of collaboration – it sets the downstream folks up for a fall and the rework it creates is an unplanned overhead to the project.

Yunmie and Mia however, are resolutely wide-lens people. They optimised the bejesus out of their UX & design co-production work and didn’t stop there. Yunmie broke out of her silo and sought out the cxpartners dev team (a bit like the A-Team obvs) to discuss the impact of her ideas. She designed accordingly and increased confidence that what was designed would be built.

Yunmie also came up with some great ways to ensure that the details of their work wouldn’t be lost in translation when the client’s dev team get to work. We hear the feedback is good.

Smart developers increase the cost/benefit

Some things are still surprisingly hard to achieve on the web. Senior Developer, Joel, presented some innocuous looking UI patterns and challenged us all to size them up. Which ones contained dragons that would breathe fire over your project plan?

One responsive layout convention – making adjacent elements equal height – has become easier as technology has improved (in this case, browser support for flexbox). Many other superficially simple patterns remain frustratingly laborious affairs.

Experience teaches developers to spot the telltale signs and estimate more accurately. But this still means more time in production than anyone might expect. Browsers are just difficult to write code for (“the most hostile software development environment imaginable” according to Douglas Crockford).

Here’s sage Joel’s take on the subject:

Often, whilst working
I will sag, shoulders heaving.
Why is it so hard?

So the story with the happier ending – such as the one regaled on Monday by Kat and Ollie – is the one where developers and designers collaborate at a much earlier stage.

During the IMechE redesign, they joined forces and used hard-earned dev insight to design out the dragons, iron out the wasteful peccadillos and improve both the predictability of the production work and cost/benefit of the overall investment.

Summary

It was really exciting to hear about what happens when you give smart, motivated people the autonomy to model their own workflow and define their own outputs.

As a developer, I was especially encouraged to hear designers talking in very pragmatic terms about the wider picture, of making real things in the real world, and adapting their ways of working to make the outcomes more effective.

It was also an affirmation that good collaboration is key to delivering value. If you share your early work with your wider project team (go and seek them out if you need to), then together you can navigate the pitfalls and turn those fantastic ideas into services that people want to use.

What are you waiting for?