Category: Together on TeamsPage 1 of 2
May be the biggest deciding factor of your success on a project.
What is built is what is real. A design is simply an idea until it can get into the hands of your users. How do you get it built? Who will do it, and what might cause it to change along the way?
One of the best qualities of working with a team is diversity, and that comes through in working styles, too. This can cause friction when different styles of critique – or reactions to stress – clash.
We’re all time-constrained at work. In this kind of regiment we each track our own time and goals, and can feel the pressure to keep moving. Sometimes the best thing to do is to pause, and let others take the conversation forward.
Design is a relay race where the work you do now can affect your product after you have moved on. How are you planning on handing off that baton to the next designer?
Without a shared understanding of the goals and priorities, you may optimize towards the solutions that are easiest to measure. You may, in effect, game your own system.
How do you learn about the people you’re designing for? You may be overlooking teams that are just as invested as you are in understanding your users–those who sell and train users about your product.
Getting feedback can be revealing in more ways than you might expect. Listen for the emotional reactions, the ones that comes from that deep-seated “reptile” part of our brain, for cues that there is more to be understood.
No matter how well-arranged your interface is or how simple your flows are, the imagery you use in your designs will have a disproportionately large influence on how it will be received. Beautiful imagery, when done right, can be a powerful force for progress.
Everyone loves a good story. While you may not remember all of the details of a story, you’ll remember enough of the setup and the emotion to recall it at a moment’s notice. Use that same stickiness as a way to keep other points of view in mind.
That DIY drive to get something made will get you to the practical puzzles quickly…which can cover limitations that may be far more subtle. You need other perspectives. You need the tripod.