Building and managing a UX team: roles and process
The world of UX is evolving fast and more organizations seem to acknowledge its power now. Utilizing the power of effective and efficient UX design, big corporations such as the likes of Walmart, reported up to a 200% increase in orders after they improved their online experience. There’s no denying the need for specialized UX experts but is it really as simple as it sounds? The short answer; no.
The UX design process is a combination of multiple sub-step specializations that come together to provide the design with its efficiency and results that it produces. A team of experts; each the master of his own craft is required to achieve an impressive UX design. So, here I will try to cover the UX roles that are included inside the team that I work with and what are their responsibilities. After that, I will try to explain the process that we follow and how we incorporate those roles into it.
I will try to breakdown every single aspect of an impressive UX team from Roles and Expertise required to how the whole process executes itself, and this is just an example of how the UX team that I work with is structured, and it represents the process that works for us, but it doesn’t mean everyone has to follow it. You build your own processes, you build what works for you and your product.
UX design, in essence, comprises of 3 different domains inside our team: UX design, UI design, and UX Content/Copy-writing. Each of these has dedicated experts responsible for the execution of certain tasks, let’s start with covering the UX roles that are included on our team.
The Roles
UX Researcher
They step into the customer’s or User’s shoes and feel how they feel about the product or service. This helps them identify and empathize with potential customer pain points along with their preferences. The needs of users are assessed, usually through an interview or by imagining different personas, which helps in creating a perfect and seamless user experience as it is exclusive to a specific end consumer/user.
The effort invested in doing extensive research certainly pays off in producing results as, in the UX world, the ones who understand their customers best are the ones who win.
- Focus: Who is our user and what are their core requirements?
- Toolkit: Contextual observation, user interviews, user surveys, process life cycle, user journey mapping, opportunity workshop, user personas, design thinking workshops, etc.
UX Designer
Their responsibility is to ensure the practical execution of the design and how is it perceived by the users. Their role is critical as they have to ensure that no obstructions or hurdles lie in the user’s whole journey through the product or service.
Keeping the entire concept coherent and connecting the dots to ensure a smooth User Experience is the UX designers Job. They strive to provide users with the perfect functionality, meet their expectations, and make the overall experience virtually error-free.
Calling UX designers the ‘soul’ of the whole process won’t be an exaggeration as they are the one’s responsible for generating results. From research to design, testing to analyzing performance — UX designers emphasize every single detail as this is the back-end of the product, if it’s inefficient, the product is doomed.
Information Architects
The user interacts with the information presented to them. Most products have all the necessary information but they lack positioning it in the right manner and when this happens, the customer’s questions remain unanswered and it pushes them away.
The information architect plays a crucial role in organizing and structuring the information in a manner that streamlines the complete user experience. They provide users, with the right information, at the right place. The Information Architect is responsible for the structure of a website, app, or any other interactive product.
- Focus: What questions do the users ask and how to answer them?
- Toolkit: Grouping information clusters, card sorting, content hierarchy, sitemaps
Usability Expert
Usability experts test the design for optimal user experience, they validate the design through different strategies and identify the problems on the user’s end. The product is tested with certain expectations that the targeted customer has, and if those expectations are not met at any given point in the whole user experience, usability experts provide feedback to designers and help perfect the experience.
- Focus: Is our product beneficial for the users? What issues are they facing?
- Toolkit: Test plans, proof of concept, testing debriefs, guerrilla testing, A/B testing.
Visual Designer
Visual designers engineer the front-end and overall aesthetics of the product. Based on UX research, they choose related colors, typography, and iconography that perfectly match the preferences of the end-user.
They create visual components that are user-friendly, engaging, and provide a rich user experience. A virtual designer ensures that the customer’s visual experience of the product is ideal and no unnecessary details or design formality makes it hard for them to navigate through the app.
In essence, all their efforts are to make the product look at how the user actually wants it to.
- Focus: What is visually appealing to our users?
- Toolkit: overall layout, typography, patterns, iconography, micro-interactions, color palettes, design systems, etc.
Interaction Designer
Interaction designers craft the perfect interaction between the product and users. They involve all expected reactions and feedback’s from the product in response to the user’s actions. The interaction designer ensures that the product works just the way it should and come up to the user’s expectations, they work to eliminate any undesired outcomes during the practical execution of the product.
- Focus: How do users navigate through a product or application?
- Toolkit: Workflows, wire-frames, whiteboard sessions, task flow diagrams, development lingo, animations.
Content Strategist
Content strategists perfect the user experience by communicating with users on their own terms and their own level. This creates rapport and eventually a relationship of trust and credibility with the users. They are responsible for content strategy, quality, and strategic delivery. They ensure that brand guidelines are followed at each step along the way and the perfect message gets across to the user/customers.
- Focus: How our users prefer to communicate? What should we say to them?
- Toolkit: Modelling of content, the voice of product, tone decisions, content guidelines
UX Design Process:
UX design proceeds in phases and each phase is equally critical for an overall effective design. We will break down the whole process into given phases and then discuss each one of them:
Understand / Product Brief
During this phase, the design team should meet, talk, observe, and understand users' involvement in their environment for the product that they will design. Here we are not talking for the users as end-users, but for stakeholders like business people, product owners, managers, developers, clients, etc.
The design team should analyze requirements to understand and clarify them. They should understand what the business wants to build, who will be using it (a basic idea for the user persona), and what will be the benefit for both business and customers.
Product Research / User Research
This is the fundamental phase of UX design, where we conduct a market analysis and user research. UX design depends upon knowing the desires, priorities, motives, and attitudes of clients. Thus, research and analysis let designers get into the target audience’s mind and sketch a proposal accordingly.
The designer will make educated decisions through solid analysis, rather than tossing darts into the dark based on assumptions. Excellent research conducting platforms include focus groups, online polls, and consumer and stakeholder interviews. Competitive analysis is yet another feasible channel for research. In addition, analysis lets you understand how you can earn returns on your design investment. It lays the foundation of UX design before the design process begins, during it, and afterward as well.
The aim is to ensure that you understand the possible problems that complicate the lives of your users, understand how they communicate with your design and keep track of any problems that might arise with usability. The data collected is then analyzed and used for the development of informed people. These are fictitious depictions of real end-users that are targeted by the designer. These personas rely on the next stage in the UX process.
Brainstorm / Sketching / Design
At this point, UX designers sketch the design of the product based on the persona generated at the end of the user research phase. The designer constructs the content in this process according to the scenarios. Scenarios are narrative ways to reflect the path of the consumer, or a day in their life. They clarify how the product blends into the life of the customer (typically a website or app); it is essential for a UX designer.
Designers generally use the design methodology of information architecture in this regard. This phase can cover a few low-fidelity designs on the following stages:
- Sketching: During this stage, we can generate basic product design ideas and work on basic sketches. It is important to work with all the people involved in developing the product, so brainstorming with stakeholders to get feedback from a business, technical or product perspective is a must. Before moving to the next stage we can re-draw sketches and re-test them with stakeholders as many times as required until we come up with a better solution.
- Wireframing: Wireframing provides an example illustrating how the final product (program, app, website, or software) would look. This technique is useful for the representation of the product design and the overall enhancement of customer experience.
- Prototyping: The duties of a UX designer in this process include preparing a rough version of the software. To enhance original ideas, the process moves around playing with the design, resolving any mistakes or contradictions, and generating data to use it.
If these initial steps are taken, prototyping encourages the designer, including management, to share the product with other team members. The designer needs to carefully review the usability and functionality of the product in proceeding forward.
Product Testing
UX designers at this stage are learning about any issues that could occur as users interact with the app. Quality testing can be as easy as consumer observation or may require complicated test procedures such as, introducing different versions of the product to learn which is the best.
Often designers may generate surveys and questionnaires. Moreover, if they find problem areas, designers can interview users. The simplest of all approaches used to test users is to watch users as they interact with the product.
Measurement
UX design, once the final product is released, does not pack its bags and go. UX is a mechanism that lives for as long as the product is in use. The product must be consistently checked to ensure that it satisfies consumer satisfaction.
It also finds the need for any modifications and takes action accordingly. How likely a consumer is to recommend the product to others is a common indicator.
UI Design Process
Visual design is a completely self-explanatory UX design subset that focuses on how the product appears and is set out. Under this group, the following work titles are used: Visual designer, UI designer, Digital designer, UI artist, etc.
All the screens of the product, including its interactive properties and visual elements, are planned and developed by the visual designer. Visual designer duties are supposed to be:
- Collaborating: collaborating closely with the UX designer and developers to learn about the concept of the product and target users before submission of the design.
- Design: preparation of an interactive, visually pleasing design begins with the development of a style guide, the design of each panel, the layout of responsive design, the design of UI elements (such as sliders, buttons, and icons), creating a design system, and the interactivity of each UI element.
- Prototyping: checking the prototypes frequently to see them in motion and to find defects that can be corrected.
Anyway, besides the duties which I mentioned above, this is the UI design process that a visual designer inside our team follows to create the user interface:
- Understanding Research Insights: During this phase UI team goes through the research insights provide by UX researchers and tries to understand what the team is building.
- Creating Information Architecture: Based on the Information Architecture that was built by the UX team, a visual designer can understand what kind of visual components they would need to represent that information architecture.
- Designing Wireframes: There will be few phases of back and forth with the UX team and product team till wireframes will help the product team, design team, and technical team to visualize what the product would look like.
- Organizing Screen Flows: Here visual designers will define all the possible screens that will exist inside the product, and they will organize their flow between the screens.
- Rapid Prototype: Rapid prototype will help visual designers to ideate, test, and get early feedback from the product team and other stakeholders, with the purpose to avoid any future mistakes during the user interface design stage.
- Build and Update a living Design System & Design Version Control: One of the key components of the UI design process is building the design system. This will add value for the product to scale and also it will help to bridge the gap between the design team, product team, and development team. It will help to churn out updates quickly in the future.
- Designing User Interface: This is one of the most crucial steps of the UI design process since this is the end-result of what the user will see from the product. All the stages of the UX and UI design process that we went above, are to have a clear understanding of what and how we will represent it visually to the users.
- Add Motion Design: Adding motion design to our user interface will make its experience richer and will enhance user engagement with the product.
- Design Hand-over: This is a continuous collaboration between designers and developers rather than a one-time hand-off.
- Test, Improve & Update: User’s needs, challenges, behaviors, expectations, etc, keep on evolving, and hence we need to keep improving your product.
UX Writing
UX writing, in essence, comprises of answering user’s queries and their concerns effectively.
The answers to the following questions determine the direction and communication of a brand.
- What is the project/feature?
- Why are we doing this feature?
- For whom are you going to be working?
- What are the market applications of the project?
- What are the design consequences? (for both copy and visuals)
- What will the timelines look like?
Leadership — The Role of UX Team Lead or Chief Design Officer:
As the journey towards a successful UX design is not linear and there are a great input and sharing of ideas from multiple individuals, it becomes hard managing and organizing all the available information according to the decided strategy. This is where the Team Lead comes into play. Through supreme leadership and dedication, they ensure that everyone is on the same page and there are no conflicts affecting the design.
They encourage and lift up team members and strive to eliminate any problems. Through their focused efforts and strong work ethic, they ensure that projects are completed with no compromises on quality and according to the decided timeline.
Conclusion:
It is apparent that UX is now a necessity that can no longer be overlooked. And to become the best in it, dedicated experts are the best way to move forward. Specialized individuals doing what they do the best results in a design that generates results and revenue. We hope that the emphasis on effective team building would help you avoid the shortcuts and stay the course for the long-term, efficient UX design.
