When you aren’t sure if your plan will work, it pays to run a test.
- To deliver impact, test key assumptions about your users
- To deliver impact on time, check the delivery track for obstacles too
Most of our blogs are about (1). But not this one. This one’s for you too, delivery people.
If you’re making software, peril lurks between designers and developers.
You might not know it though. Especially if the UXers are busy high-fiving the product manager. The prototypes tested well and they led a handover. The developers were a bit quiet, but they’re like that.
Six months later, you’re all on a Teams call with the big cheeses. It turns out that the dev team were brilliant at most things, but lacked front-end skills. Left to their own devices:
- They’d struggled to work efficiently with ‘collaborative’ design tools like Figma
- They’d expected coded CSS files that they could ‘drop in’, so they had to improvise
- That meant delays, and the user experience didn’t match the vision
Plus, they’d already done things that meant the solution couldn’t be built as designed.
- They’d made technology decisions that limited the choice of UI libraries
- The APIs they’d built didn’t line up with the functional requirements
- More delays, more unexpected compromises to the user experience
Lessons will be learned, you all agree. You will absolutely run a test to flush out this stuff next time.
