UX teams — Challenges of Collaborative Environment

It’s definitely good for all designers to collaborate and work together as team. However, ‘good things come with its own drawbacks too’. I am just here to share some stories of UX team transitions and its challenges. Overcoming these challenges may be tricky and it depends on the project infra and setup or culture you are working in.

Team Collaboration

Well, let’s look at what you would try to achieve by getting all designer collaborate and work together for better productivity and learning.

What are your goals?

• You don’t want people working in silos — Yes, this definitely gets better culture in workplace to have everyone work together where you can learn, grow, voice your opinions, have knowledge across products (even when you are not actually working on it), brainstorm, get diverse ideas etc.
• Align with business goals — Each designer should work for a same goal of the company which helps everyone deliver their work as per quality, consistency, and efficiency. Successful products always have people working towards same goals.
• Maintain transparency in work — Each designer could be handling different features of the products or different products altogether. It’s always better to know what your co-worker is working on which helps you learn the holistic view of the products across functions.
• Share knowledge — Knowledge sharing is always good for growing in your career. Its improves communication skills, social skills, keeps you upto-date with latest trends.
• Take feedback and iterate the designs — Sometimes we get so lost in our own work that we forget to look at the problems in a 360 degree approach. This platform gives you that chance. With feedback you improve and learn more.
• Smooth transitions within team members in their absence or resource downsizing — Knowing the product holistically lets you fill in for your co-worker in their absence and helps successful delivery of the planned work.
• Manage ux teams at different locations by appointing ux leads for each team — It’s sometimes better to have a single representative of a team when the team is diversed across locations or skills. A single person can represent team for bigger events like pitching your product, meeting stakeholders, taking a larger responsibility at handling and delivery of work and who also has a bird eye view of the work done.

Now, let us see the drawbacks you face while trying to come together as team…

Tug of war

• Hard to come to an agreement on a design decision — Lack of product knowledge holistically and individually can lead to having good designs scrap out because feedback is given with own assumptions of what we see on UI. Usabiltiy testing and talking with stakeholders is very important before you shun any design due to internal feedback.
• Seniority levels and roles getting in play — Too many senior roles can have clashes. Maintaining the design team’s hierarchy is very crucial. The higher management teams should clearly define each person’s roles and responsibilities clearly so that the team handling is more streamlined.
• UX processes not in place — Each designer ends up coming with their own techniques of research when there are processes not defined. I understand each problem is solved different ways, however, if processes are defined and past experiences are documented then the research will get more accurate and data efficiency will be high.
• Feedback sessions — Even though scrum calls are there, every designer may look at other designers work in a glance just to give feedback. However, they should understand the product before giving feedback. The challenge here for designer is try to create user flows/tasks flows, user journeys so that other designers understand why you have taken those design decisions and what is the goal. I feel teams should have separate calls to discuss about the features overall so that feedback is not given in scrum calls or daily update calls. Daily scrum calls are more to get together and share what you are working on which does not set the proper base and mindset on designers attending to review or brainstorm on something more vast.
• Design systems still be in developing phase — When you try to innovate you keep updating design system which might not be a good thing in the long run. You may end up getting stuck in the loop of designing screens and re-designing components to suit new requirements. Evolving is always good as per new ux trends but introducing new components every time while innovating might lead to shortcomings.
• Dev-driven team s— The design teams led by dev managers or hard core developers might not be a great idea. It changes the direction which we work. Having ux person who is from a design background and has core ux experience who can hold everyone together, keep team on same page, make their design goals clear in their minds, encourage ux teams to run sessions and hands-on ux exercises will be a perfect leader for the ux team(in terms of processes). All the UX team members should speak same language.

Speaking about good leader and how they should be is all together a separate topic however, we are talking about the collaboration and having streamlined process is more of my focus here.

In continuation to this article, I will be showing some tips with examples of how to present your work when there is chaos like this in your design teams 😊

Hope this helps everyone. Thanks for staying with me till here. 💯

Happy reading and learning! 👩‍🏫