A UX beyond the product
Extending the double diamond process
I began my journey into the world of design a little over four years ago. A fascinating aspect of being in the field is evaluating and analysing everything from a user experience point of view. Yet few of us try to iterate on things beyond the pixels we create for products. Here’s how I’ve applied the double diamond method to our team practices.
Discovering areas of improvement
Most of us designers work in teams but even with our ability to empathise with the people we create for, we don’t easily extend it to those we work with. So I took a step back from the screen and looked within the team. I found tens of things that could be improved, from how I communicate my designs to how design is integrated into the delivery process.
I see it this way: we are surrounded by people who bring our ideas to life. Be it the stakeholders who fund the project, POs who oversee its development or our friendly engineers who breathe life into them. We must seek ways to optimise collaboration with them to create great products. There’s always room for improvement.
Define opportunities
Once the friction points have been identified, double down on those that bring the most value from its improvement. Sometimes, the changes needed will be significant and take time. The key is to identify and define the problems well and have regular conversations, especially with those who will be the most impacted.
Amongst the opportunities I found, collaboration with devs, specifically design consumption, came out on top in terms of effort and value (think prioritisation matrix).
Developing solutions
I’ve come to realise that at the heart of great products are the people building them — the stronger the team, the better the products they deliver.
To make teams stronger requires us to build good relationships with our peers.
And to build good relationships, we need to better understand the people we’re working with. This can be conversations over coffee, a team-building activity or pairing with someone on a work task.
In my case, understanding the problem required more research. So I conducted some contextual inquiry to find how my devs work on an average day–an enlightening experience. Figma wasn’t being used the way I expected. They weren’t inspecting components deeply, and there was a lot of guesswork going on.
Delivering better practices
Design is, first and foremost, a form of communication. Its primary aim should be to clearly communicate our ideas so devs can build them well.
If there’s friction in how the designs are consumed, the designers’ task is to find ways to remove them.
In my instance, it involved making an effort to manually add design specifications. This included outlining the information that may be buried, such as nested components, using components from different or older versions of the design system and notes about behaviours of various elements.
I highly recommend using annotations to accomplish something like this, I personally use this annotation kit by Mixpanel and my devs are very happy that I do.
Iterate, always
No product is perfect, and neither are the teams’ ways of working in creating them. There’s always something to improve.
Since the previous set of changes, I’ve made further updates to my files. I include change-logs and sticky notes to highlight specific information.
Next up is to increase navigation within the files and many more. It’s likely always going to be a work in progress as needs, pains, and goals change along the way.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! I share my thoughts about design and other things on Twitter and would love to connect with you there.
