Collaboration in Design part one: UX Design in Retrospective

Design is currently everywhere, understanding itself as a guiding hand in the times of digital restructuring. While aesthetics as well as the functional part in design, since ever have been a big factor, collaboration, user testing and customer involvement is becoming a key ingredient for good design.

To understand how good collaboration and efficient division of work in teams can prosper it is essential to look back at the history of UX Design. This helps to understand how design processes have changed over time, and leaves an impression how software as a tool will continue to change. This chapter focuses on the history and evolution of User Experience Design, looking deeper into the executional phases and approaches of design.

What is User Experience Design?

User Experience Design (UXD) was first described with the term User-Centered (System) Design (UCD) in Donald Arthur Norman’s book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. When it was published in 1988 it marked a shift from the pure aesthetics and predefined range of functionalities of interfaces towards a design process that had a deeper concentration on the real needs of users. By splitting down the experience with a product or company into its single touchpoints with the product, the real needs of a product or service could be better understood. In consequence designers obtained a much broader and more holistic view on the core functionalities and values the outcome of their work should have.

Today the term User-Centered Design (UCD) has become broad
and fuzzy, focusing on different core-themes and having a variety of faces, titles, and interpretations. Some of them are closer to Donald Norman’s original description of User-Centered Design, while others emerged from the profession when the field scaled up. Some examples of common denominations are:

» Interface Designer

» Interaction Designer

» User Experience Architect

» User Experience Researcher

» Customer Experience Designer

» Service Designer

» User Experience Management

» Information Architect

…

All of these professions are connected by the way of focus they put upon their work, keeping the user at the center of the experience. While the relevance of User-Centered Design Systems still remains the same today, the way it is performed and leads to satisfactory results is a totally different story from the one back in 1988. To understand how collaboration in UX Design processes the development of software changed and why it is necessary to understand the history of UX Methods. This will also help us to understand why the tools we are using every day changed over time.

Classic User Experience Design in Software Production

In its original form, processes in UX Design were emphasised by the waterfall model. The waterfall model originated in the manufacturing and construction industries, and describes a linear process cascading through five production phases all strictly separated by time. Interdisciplinary collaborations were linear and isolated, with tasks clearly divided between team members.

Because the processes in the physical production segments were highly cost-effective and structural, the extraction of software development was rather static and inflexible, not being designed to loop back for another iteration. If a new iteration had to be made, this usually happened in the following production cycle. As a consequence it lead to very detailed phases, obliging the team to carefully consider every factor. It also required complex, pixel perfect handovers which included detailed summaries of rules and structures. This was timeconsuming and had to be done in a purposeful and disciplined manner. Otherwise, it would lead to issues of communication and loss of information. Aside from pen and paper, at this point in time it was quite common for UX Designers to use Photoshop as their main tool for designing wireframes as well as the finished screens. When Macromedia’s Flash arrived in the early 2000s it allowed designers to build their own websites in a visual graphical user interface (GUI). Both pixel and image-based tools were powerful, allowing lots of creative freedom in execution of design. This freedom together with the linear process allowed a broad diversity of designs which was also reflected in the diversity of the web.

The possibilities in terms of interactions, components, and flows were evolving around this time. Some patterns were quickly accepted and became popular, while others got discarded for being impractical or difficult to understand. Transferring the static and image-based materials from the design into code was complex, resulting in singular and quite unique implementation-procedures that could not be reused. Thus developing products was time consuming and often resulted in a loss of detail or charm from the original design.

From Lean Manufacturing to Lean UX

Like the waterfall design process, Lean UX is also a derivative of expansions of the physical production methodology Lean Manufacturing which is mostly used in the production industry nowadays. Lean Manufacturing, developed by Toyota Production System (TPS) in 1990, was designed for cutting out waste in car production. The approach aims to lower costs by minimising activities and processes that do not add to the speed, quality or outcome of production process. The idea of having production, measuring, and learning in a continuous loop and splitting the processes (and product) into many smaller pieces that can be analyzed and improved independently dramatically affected the efficiency and quality of production. By reducing costs and time, Lean Manufacturing has helped Toyota to become the biggest car manufacturer in the world today.

Lean Thinking became popular and got attention from other fields. Eric Ries transfers the idea of Lean Thinking for application to the testing of a business hypothesis. Around that time Lean became a mindset for a management philosophy that embraced scientific thinking for exploring how well the beliefs and assumptions of the team suited the needs of a developed system.
Jeff Gothelf took the existing approaches of Lean, converging them with his own thoughts on User Experience Design. The result is a set of new principles, tactics, and techniques helping agile teams to integrate UX Design smoothly. His book was first released in 2013.

For established products that receive lots of user feedback, Lean UX has almost become an industry standard today. It works well within agile teams, making it possible to iterate quickly. The feedback ignites the continual progression and improvement of the design, which then produces new ideas which in turn result in features that generate new feedback in the review. The system works in a self sufficient manner and keeps momentum. Lean UX requires communication between all members of the organisation, creating clarity and transparency throughout the process, from member to member and team to team, but also with customers, allowing them to opt out if necessary.

However, for emerging products, the Lean UX approach alone is unsuitable as real user feedback is missing and therefore cannot crank up the production cycle. When Lean UX is applied to the development of an emerging product without capturing external evaluation in the process, features would often become discarded for not being user centered right after their development.. The problem with Lean UX in its isolated form is that the progression of production in design is too undefined to make the engine of the process run smoothly. This presented a new problem for the process of UX Design because, as a result of its nature, Lean UX could not always ensure strong, valid UX Components and flows. There was a need for something that generated more stability and consistency by bringing back more creative freedom. To ensure good quality and fit for the user an addition was needed that would allow a more holistic perspective in the creative process without returning to the classic waterfall process. For many teams, the solution was to partially integrate design by adding thinking blocks into their process. Googles Ventures Design Sprint provided a methodology for a streamlined creative block and is being used by many design-teams in multiple variations today.

Design Sprint

When teams want to reduce the risks when bringing a new product, service or feature to the market it often is a good idea to organise a Design Sprint. A Design Sprint ideally is held by 4–7 people, generally including a facilitator, the project manager, designers, engineers and often the CEO. The sprint is constrained to a specific period of time of 4–5 days. It consists of five phases, structured by a dense timetable. During the sprint phases, the team runs through the process of a waterfall in a very streamlined and rapid manner. The objective of a design sprint is about keeping momentum during the entire sprint, by firing everyone with enthusiasm, while including the whole product team in the process. This way, experts from different departments work in sync, simultaneously building something that everyone will be aligned with. At the end of a sprint, the vision is described in concepts and ideas for features which are then translated into a prototype. The prototypes are essential in the testing of the new concepts with real users to get external feedback and be able to evaluate the concepts.

The power of the execution of design in Design Sprints lies in reduction. Reduction of complexity, reduction of visual detail and reduction of the time spent on each phase. A Design Sprint isn’t much more than a accelerated classic UX Design process. Ian Armstrong puts the difference between a classic UX Design process and a Design Sprint in a nutshell as the distinction between „an artistic masterpiece and a napkin-sketch.“

The result of a Design Sprint might not be beautiful, but it’s useful and progressive. By directly testing the quickly developed features time is saved and a more realistic estimation of the scope and complexity of their implementation can be made. If a Design Sprint is successful, the outcome can immediately be refined and developed because all involved parties are already aligned. If it is not successful, the team usually has a good base of knowledge gained from the interviews and the process itself, and so they can continue to build upon it. Design Sprints can help teams to think outside the box, learn and generate ideas quickly. That is why it is considered by many to be filling the gap that evolved when pushing UX Processes into agile working environments with Lean UX.

How are we going to design tomorrow?

Today, the field is faced with a new generation of designers with new ideals. The desire for independence, alongside regulated working hours and enough quality-time for family and friends, is increasing. Employees want to have more flexibility and at the same time favour challenging jobs that encourage personal growth and require them to assume different roles. Simultaneously, more and more design offices are employing on a project-based and short-term basis, reducing their own risks and costs while being able to adapt quickly to the needs of the market. Their function is changing from a secure work-supplying role to an intermediary role.

According to a study from the software-company »Intuit« design offices will make 40% of all employees in the USA freelancers until 2020, producing fast-moving work environments and performance-driven career-paths.

These fluid models of working require a dramatic shift of mindset, tools, and structures for collaboration in teams. Software needs to adapt to enhance collaborative work and thinking to be able to cover the iterative needs. Design processes need to get more agile and production instances interweaved more strongly. The methodology of Lean UX provides a good framework to tackle the new way of collaboration, requiring shorter acclimatisation periods and driving exchange by reducing meanings of status and authority of particular individuals.

This was the first article of the series “Collaboration in Design — How agile processes and closer collaboration can lead to more creative outcomes, and how software needs to adapt”.

Next week I will be writing about the influence that technology had on design collaboration, and how this affects our future work in the field of design.

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I am a curious and passionated Interface Designer always looking for new challenges and topics. For any questions or possible discussions, ping me on LinkedIn or at julianlucaswohlleber@me.com.

Many thanks to my supervisors Prof Boris Müller and Ivan Provenzale for guiding me during the process of writing by providing contextual and support and sharing their experiences with me.