Designer-Developer Dissonance
Navigating challenging UX team dynamics
Speaker: Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
Although both UI/UX Designers and Developers are invested in project success, they have fundamentally different priorities. Designers advocate for user needs – easy to understand, frictionless user experiences - while developers advocate for the technology - robust, updateable, maintainable code. Not everyone in an organization will necessarily have the same commitment level to UX quality. How do the teams collaborate effectively, keep conflicts to a minimum and go on to complete successful projects?
Even little events can trigger dissonance and that can then grow and persist and eat away at effective collaboration. There are always inevitable changes to a project plan and schedule that will derail ongoing work. Designing is such labor-intensive work, that designer seek ways to be more efficient, keeping specs light and not articulating designs to the last detail. Developers feel it’s ok or even feel obligated to step into the domain of UX given gaps in specs and short deadlines, taking away the authority of the designer over the UX.
Designers are ultimately responsible for the quality of a final UX and need commonsense strategies for working together with developers. By following a handful of best practices, effective collaboration between designers and developers is not so difficult.
What You'll Learn:
- How to recognize and analyze collaboration conflicts
- Strategies for productive collaboration between the conflicting priorities of designers and developers
Why attend?
- Your UX team struggles to get designs implemented successfully
- Your UX team has frustration and conflicts with developers
- Your team is involved in projects with a high rate of missed deadlines and even failures
Topics Covered:
The Symptoms of Conflicts
- Team members feel the discord
- Designers aren’t happy with the implementation of their designs and feel stonewalled on designer feedback
- Developers feel annoyed, nit-picked, confused, ignored, run around in circles
- Missed deadlines
- Misunderstandings
- Mediocre outcomes on projects
The Causes of Conflicts
- Designers and developers don’t respect each other’s domain skills and responsibilities
- Professional priorities conflict
- Uneven levels of commitment to UX quality
- Incomplete specs or spec expectations not set at the outset
- Nature of a project
- Communication styles
- Work processes employed
- Organizational support of UX quality
The Importance of Your Organization’s Mission
- Awareness of user empathy
- Commitment to UX quality
Strategies and Practices
- Setting expectations
- Completion level and style of specs
- How and when communication occurs
- Process of review, comment, and iteration
- Discipline enforcement
- Acknowledgement of mistakes
About the Speaker
A UX master devoted to creating beautiful usability and usable beauty, Dorothy enjoys a well-earned reputation for creating stunning interfaces on cutting-edge products. She currently is employed at Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc, in Waltham MA, as Director of UX R&D, working primarily on internet of thing devices.
Online Seminar