Collaboration between UX team and developers

Great ideas witness some of the best professional collaborations and friendships on their way to becoming successful products/solutions. Even the smallest enhancement in an Enterprise scale product provokes keen and careful teams to invest their expertise and co-create a delightful UX process.

Enterprise teams in a UX agency are often well-spread and keeping everyone on the same page might seem like a wishful expectation. At Koru, we have learnt that the very best of UX solutioning is a collaborative effort and the differentiator between ‘job done’ and ‘well done’ lies in engaging the right process.

Here are some characteristics of a positive collaboration to help you ensure your development teams are able to make the most out of a user engagement project.

Plan to Take Technical Opinion

Have you ever lost your keys in plain sight and are taken aback when a friend picks them up from a spot right in front of you? People generally don’t see things the same way based on their personal taste, preference, or past experiences. UX teams and developers often see things very differently as well, as a result of their own skills, talents, and strengths.

You might feel that you may have covered every aspect of the requirement between yourself and the UX team, but it is important to involve the development team to ensure that the proposed direction of solution is technically feasible. In fact, reviews can outline some very important insights and hence it is advisable to include all major stakeholders to be a part of the process at the end of each UX sprint.

Build Design Thinking into Your Culture

As UX designers, we like to ask nice questions and leave it to the involved stakeholders to understand and respond to them. We have realized that besides keeping the solutioning unbiased and fact driven, it motivates individuals and teams to highlight their concerns and push their creative strengths to think from an experience and impact standpoint.

In most cases, user engagement helps designers and engineers to think with a common vision. In order to get the best of it, our UX methods and exercises are focused on building a shared vision.

Reason Collaboratively

If a team comes to you explaining why something can’t be done, put that out to a larger forum and find other ways to achieve it. Rather than scrapping the whole direction, you might be able to make minor changes and go on to achieve the desired goal.

We have found that user engagement prototypes are a great way to give a basic form to ideas and brainstorm. They allow you to build quick iterations and test multiple directions. Once you feel you have a compelling tie between two or three firm directions, put them out for User Testing and allow the truest users get you the answer you are looking for.

Besides the above, engaging a UX agency that has extensive experience in working with development teams would accelerate the efforts. Having worked on over 250 eUX projects, we have had the pleasure of defining dynamic processes which ensure that every minute detail sees the light of the day. The right process weighs emphasis on bringing the right people at the right time and give you a creative space to collaborate and solve problems holistically.

Closing Thought

Teams with common visions and goals are known to work past limitations and build products that compile the best of everyone’s expertise. We at Koru have been proud of such collaborations with our clients and the work done together, thanks to those great ideas that brought us together.