IT first, User Experience Design second.
How we made the IT Infrastructure more important in the first place and how we made User Experience Design came second — an experience report of a 2-Month-Side-Project.
Lately, I’ve been working on a project with an IT-first approach. User Experience Design came second. In this article I’m going to share my experiences with you: what made the process special, how did we approach things and how it changed our minds of developing platforms — from developer’s point of view.
Don’t get me wrong, we worked on User Experience as well and did a good job there, too.
The Project
At mediaman we had a running challenge in May: We separated our athletes into two teams and the team which ran the most kilometer within two week would win the challenge. Quickly we’ve built dashboards to show our statistics. Read our blog post about the first challenge here.
Afterwards, our goal was to build a platform called remoterun.de which was determined to motivate companies to walk, hike or run together. Each company can choose its own donation amount which will be donated to a charity organization.
The Idea
In our first version, every entry in our dashboards was done manually — a crucial point that we wanted to change. We wished to connect different running apps (like Strava) to collect activities automatically.
So, why IT first?
In the very beginning we started with a very rough proof of concept: Register a Strava App with API keys and fetch the activity data. Our main goal here was to use AWS Lambda for a serverless application.
After a few hours of setting up this infrastructure and make Strava automatically call our endpoints, the very base was done. We were able to collect data.
That was when our approach to do IT first was approved. This was the very first step to make the project work at all. From then, we started setting up database structures, endpoint structures and a very basic Frontend Angular application.
I can’t remember how many hours were already on the clock — but it was lot.
Only after this setup was made, our Designer was asked to create a user experience design. We were working closely together. At every point of development the designer did know about the IT restrictions and possibilities. We as developers were able to get glances on the design at every time.
It was an amazing experience to work closely together with the design department, to make him understand our idea of data driven frontends and vice versa showing us his opinion about user experience design.
Change of minds
We all learned a lot during these days. All in all the project went to production within 2 months as a side project — yes, we did that all in our leisure time! At this point we all had work to do for our employer.
Every time we as developers published a new feature in the frontend, we asked our designer to support us in how to display data. In addition, he was already part of the IT concept phases in which we decided on how to build our software architecture. That’s a crucial point in our workflow: understand the designers work and make them understand our work.
Conclusion
My personal opinion about this approach is that it’s very worth it. Make IT first build the infrastructure and then closely together with designers, create and expand the platform. This is so time-saving because we got rid of endless feedback loops, of bug reports that were just a result of misunderstandings.
In addition to that we were able to create the design based on what’s the most logical and safe way of implementing the frontend and backend. Developer might understand me: Often we are asked to “hack” the IT infrastructure and mainly the frontend based on what Designers designed and clients approved. Here, we were able to focus on the core of this application in its technical part and still creating the best solution on both sides, IT and Design.
Besides, we developed a super strong team spirit by listening and giving honest feedback every time and working closely together. 😍
Yes, we were developing an MVP in a short amount of time but as soon as the project went live, it didn’t feel like an MVP anymore. It felt so real, so cool to finally see our system being used by other people than us.
Check out our project on https://remoterun.de
