How to Use Engineers in a UX Department
0 likes481 views
The document discusses integrating user-centered engineering within UX departments to improve digital product quality by fostering collaboration between designers and engineers. It emphasizes the importance of rapid prototyping, knowledge sharing, and creating a culture of learning to reduce coordination costs and enhance product development. Additionally, it highlights the need for consistent design systems and encourages early user testing to inform design direction.
How to Use Engineers in a UX Department
- 1. Barbarians at the Gates How to Bring Engineers into Your UX Department in order to Lower Coordination and Transaction Costs Stephen M. James • @tweetllama • DevWorkshop 2015
- 7. User-Centered Engineering is a cross-disciplinary practice that takes the goals of User Centered Design, supports the designers in their learning, and implements this learning in consumable code.
- 8. User-Centered Design is more nuanced, but is typically the process you see in UX—that is research, sketching, prototyping, and iterating.
- 10. Despite UX following UCD, yet most digital products are mediocre or even substandard. And things won’t get easier. As interactions progress from clicks to taps and other gestures, traditional UCD processes will face even greater challenges. “Great user experiences requires great front-end development,” UX Matters
- 11. Who you report to determines your priorities
- 12. New features are barnacles. Can’t get them off, once they’re on. - @billwscott
- 13. Engineering is traditionally about feature delivery, not about learning about the user. Most organizations have a culture of delivery.
- 14. We want great experiences. More or less features doesn’t matter. Engineering often sees prototyping as outside of engineering. Make prototyping a first class member of your tech stack in order to…
- 15. Cultivate a culture of learning.
- 17. Minimize creating UI specs and PowerPoint presentations for meetings. Kill the large spec PDF!
- 18. Our team will enable rapid experimentation and design iteration
- 19. - @billwscott
- 20. Our team will increase collaboration between UX designers and all FEDs
- 21. Our team will strengthen the link between UX and product engineering teams see both sides of the discussion
- 22. Lower coordination and transaction costs and accelerate product development Resolving disconnects later in the product life cycle requires more time and negotiation, extends deadlines, and frustrates everyone who is part of the discussion, including UX, Engineering, and Product Management. If we aren't doing this, then this team isn't doing its job.
- 23. Designers and FEDs in a common studio space working together toward the same goal. Run past an interaction idea or discuss feasibility of a design. BOOM!
- 25. Increase perceived performance Bundling/HTTP requests, critical render path, animation
- 26. webpagetest.org
- 28. Schedule frequent knowledge- sharing sessions on both UX and front-end topics, so everybody shares a culture of learning.
- 29. Emphasis on rapid sketching and fast coding to maximize your numbers of iterations and variations. UXA wants to help inform design direction, not focus on validating already made design decisions, so we can fix issues earlier in the process. We don’t want to just be the UX department’s product team.
- 30. It's never too early to start showing your design ideas to users, beginning with your first rough sketches. Users may even feel more free to comment on sketches. Even try some internal testing to gain quick insight.
- 31. Bring cohesiveness to the chaos: Style guides, themes, design systems, standard UI controls, pattern libraries
- 32. Bring cohesiveness to the chaos: Create re-usable and engineering- friendly scalable code for across your system.
- 33. Two groups of engineers and designers… came up with the same idea. +
- 35. What is a living design system? An approach for delivering a consistent design cross-platform.
- 39. Some things to keep in mind...
- 41. The amount of useable code that the product team can use varies by time.
- 43. The type of useable code that the product team can use varies by type of prototype.
- 45. The smaller the component we pass along the likelier it will aid the product team and make it into production for the upcoming release.
- 47. Since the amount of code reuse should be proportional to the time spent, we would like to stop using the term prototype. ! We have come up with some new names for projects.
- 52. Once upon a time, in an office far, far way…
- 55. RPDs focus on what it should look and function like to the end user. Smoke and mirrors are allowed…
- 57. Also…
- 63. PEGs focus on slaying the tricky UI dragons and merging that code into production.
- 64. Stephen M. James • @tweetllama Let’s create a culture of learning, experimentation, and fail fast. Thanks for listenin’! Deck eventually available at slideshare.net/interactivellama/