User experience designing as a team sport

You can’t write a blog about teamwork without including a picture of a rowing boat…

I often work in teams made up from multiple skills — content writers, developers, testers— and one of the ways we've found to get everyone interested and involved with the project as a whole is to find tasks that everyone can work on.

In a recent project we didn't have a designer, so this presented an opportunity to get everyone involved in creating the design for the site we were building. This U.X. design, could then be picked up by a designer to be polished and finished at a later date.

For each page (or part of a page) we gave people the opportunity to make a wire-frame / mock-up / drawing of the screen before a ‘design workshop’. This workshop was just a meeting where each person explained their design, the team asked questions about it and then reached consensus on which bits of each design would make up a few prototypes we could usability test with users. Once we’d got feedback from users we could get together to discuss refining the designs further.

Benefits this brought were:

• The team is invested in the design — as they've worked on it together
• There is understanding across the whole team around what is being worked on
• It avoids individuals becoming precious about ‘their’ design, and not wanting to change it
• Prevents people retreating into ‘silos’ and losing sight of the project as a whole and other team members work

Negatives to this approach could be:

• There can be a design by committee feeling as no one person is responsible for the final design.
• Lots of tinkering on a design can take place — so a team needs to know when it is good enough

How we made sure we maximised the benefits:

• Encourage each team member by emphasising the good parts of their design — but do not be tempted to lie and say a bit of a design is good when you don’t think it is
• Keep your design workshop to a set time, with the set outcome of a defined amount of prototypes
• Know when a design is good enough. As you show designs to your users and get feedback you can move on to the next area of the site to build.