Hold on, I don’t get it.

The messiness of UX and the importance of stepping back.

The title above was my statement 2 weeks ago as we were about to lock in a core piece of our product’s design. I didn’t intend for more than half the team to stick around for an additional 4 hours, but it became clear to me that the structure of our application wasn’t quite there yet. The rest of the weekend became an entire rework of our application’s navigation. It wasn’t the visuals that needed polish; it was the entire workflow of our product.

2 weeks out, the original intention when we set out on high fidelity designs was for the UI designers on the team to consolidate the minute details of our prototype to make sure the consumer and administrative/configuration experiences of our product made sense. Yet, when we reviewed our prototypes collectively, we saw some breakdowns and needed to hit pause right then and there.

Could we have prevented this? What did we miss out on as we initially built Chorus (our product)?

Hindsight is always 20/20 but here’s two things our team could have done better on.

1. Having frequent checkins between UI designers — What we did in designing two different, though incredibly similar experiences, was have two different Sketch files for each experience. Though that makes logical sense, what would have enhanced collaboration was a quick 5 minute discussion among the 3 UI designers on what exactly changed. We assumed that all parties knew the nuances well enough and trusted them to navigate the Sketch files themselves. Whether it is verbally or through a Readme, any additional walkthrough from designer to designer to make more sense of a change log may have helped prevent pains later on.
2. Participations across experiences — There were two designers for the configuration experience, versus one (me) for the physician experience. What we should have actively done was revisit the user task flows together each week to see if anything had changed. Even as we went on to motion design and animation, having designers on either end take a peek and conduct design crits on the “alternative” side would have made a world of difference. There, we would have identified where one piece of information on the configuration’s end may impact — whether large or small — the physician’s point of view. Since both parties still sit in the same ecosystem, we could have done a better job of resolving these issues by having designers from each experience talk to one another.

In essence, much of design is proactive communication. Even UI designers require weekly synthesis and reflection to ensure prototypes reflect the most up-to-date pieces.

Alas! The next post will be our final one as we wrap up Capstone. It will be a good one to end on so please tune in!

Cheers,

Daphne