Design Democrazy

So this is a little story with a moral about how I learned that when collaborating, it is important to speak up, speak out, and allow innovation to arise out of the ashes of discourse. (Shout out to the SoFlux “UX from the Trenches” panel for inspiring this post.

This won’t be a traditional case study, where I walk you through my UX design process (check out my other posts!), but a not so quick brain dump of what I learned.

But first, some background:

It was the first project that we completed as part of the Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp. We were thrown into groups on Day 2 and given a brief about a fictitious regional supermarket looking to break into the e-groceries market. Here we are, strangers, thrusted together and told that we had a month (2 week sprint for research and UX strategies, 2 weeks to develop the UI) to produce a high fidelity prototype that would meet ABC Company’s business goals and provide a new service to their customers.

I absolutely loved my group, we had immediate chemistry. They were like my little brothers, and we had a blast together. Every step of the way, we seemed to agree, and were moving through the process quite quickly and easily. A little too easy. We would laugh, divvy up responsibilities, zoom through, and be ahead of the game throughout the whole UX process. Everyday we would observe other groups, whom were investing more time at each step due to debates over design decisions, and literally thought out loud: are we doing something wrong?

At that point, we had gone through our data, identified strong pain points, created a persona and user journey, identified opportunities for design and settled on a calendar based groceries app that allows for express ordering as well as scheduling out future orders. We seemed to be going down a successful path, however, inside, I would get frustrated when I felt like the group was moving in the wrong direction. But, thought that it would be good for the group to just go with the majority, and move on. Who knew that the whole time, my group members were thinking the same way, and our go with the flow, easy going attitudes would come back to bite us at the end.

You see, we all wanted to go with the flow. Maybe because we all are easy-going, positive folks. Maybe it was that we did not feel comfortable questioning each other because we were still getting to know one another. Regardless of our reasons, s…! hit the fan during our UI sprint, we couldn’t seem to agree on colors, users were questioning why our grocery store app was greeting them with a calendar, and basically, our project fell apart.

Of the four, I just wanted to find a common ground, one member wanted to have an open debate to find better solutions, another was adamant about making the idea work, and the fourth was indifferent. And what happened was that we chucked the calendar, argued a bit, held hands and chanted a mantra, and decided to move on with an express ordering app. We weren’t proud of our product, and it was evident. As we looked around at the kick-ass projects around us, we didn’t even want to present it. One of our group members felt as though we took the easy road and created something that already existed. Our product did meet the business and user goals, but there was no distinguishing feature that would set it apart.

I went to a couple of talks this week, which inspired me to speak on “the ugly” (shout out to Veronica Vejar) and not just focus on my the successes that I’ve had thus far. In reality, success is anytime we gain something, and even from a failure, we can gain knowledge and experience. During the “UX from the Trenches” talk, Mike Donahue spoke of design democracy vs. collaboration, and how sometimes we focus so much on being democratic that we lose out on opportunities for great design. This came up again at another event, Uxperience 3.0, where Arad Usha brought up the question, “Is simplicity at odds with possibility?” and urged UX’ers to dig deeper into the conflicts present in our data and not settle for the quick and obvious solutions.

So what is the moral here, what did I learn?

1. SPEAK UP: If what I have to say is justified by data (or even if it’s not), it is worth saying. At times I find myself choosing to stay quiet because I feel like my thought isn’t eloquent enough. But true collaboration needs real and honest conversation. And as I learned through this group project, the lack of conversation is no bueno.
2. Speak Out: I used to teach my students “accountable talk”, or the rules for engaging in academic discourse. I could’ve easily practiced what I preached and respectfully challenged an idea I disagreed with as well as made sure that my ideas were being challenged as well. It’s funny to think that if I had given my 5th graders the same challenge, they could’ve easily taught us a think or two about respectfully challenging ideas.
3. Welcome the difficulty: The groups that faced the most challenges, produced some of the most unique solutions. They thought beyond the confines of the brief and really sought to separate ABC Company from it’s competitor’s. When our test data showed that our users weren’t feeling our idea, we should’ve went back and ideated beyond trying to make the current idea work. We should have brought in some new ones. In the ‘real world’, we would have been able to go through a couple more rounds of ideation and testing, but for the sake of time, we ended up settling. Had we put aside out hang ups, and used those challenges as teachable moments, we wouldn’t have settled at all.
4. Don’t get democrazy: It can’t be rainbow and daisies all the time. It’s okay to have some constructive debate; shake hands, hug it out, or sing Kumbaya at the end and go to happy hour.

Moving forward, this former teacher turned UX’er will definitely use her teacher voice to engage and challenge (when necessary) the design process in order to allow for the awesomeness to emerge out of the post-its.