Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

That does sound like an interesting overview about the person involved in the process to define UX. From my personal experience it appears to be especially difficult to develop great UX under the pressure of time and cost effectiveness as it is the case in most agencies. Most like to spend more money on various versions of great design instead of two or three rounds of defining the UX.

Hello Michael
I can see your point, but UX saves both money and time in the long term – UX creates business value, increased acceptance and market penetration and never the less it increases effectiveness.
The design and project team is more likely to make things that user/customers want, and more likely to reach the right people with the right communication. Reduce misspent development costs by making it right the first time.
More specifically, experience design helps companies make the right things for each platform and device and to ensure sure they make the right things for the right people.
Thx for your comment! ___ Holger

Holger,
from my perspective, this is a quite interesting subject that demands for intense attention from everybody who is working on UX projects. The outline of contents seems to be quite comprehensive and promising. Therefore, I am really looking forward to reading the whole story.
cheers,
Rainer

I’d also like to explore how to best deploy a team. Are the various roles working together collaboratively from the start? To what extent? Where does the graphic designer get involved, for example? In my experience these folks don’t generally read the research materials produced early in the process (user research, market research, etc.) that should directly affect the visual look and feel of the end product. (I don’t mean to pick on graphic designers; developers, for example, don’t typically read any documentation, either. This isn’t always their fault, however, as their jobs often don’t allow time for this.) Of course, this can also affect how things work within an IA “team” and its reporting structure? If an IA team is, say, divided between research and design (with different managers, for example), how does one account for knowledge transfer between the groups? How thoroughly does research have to document in order for design IAs to faithfully carry on the work?

Not sure all of this is related to your specific objective for the article, but it’s something that affects planning (building in time for documentation and knowledge transfer), and it’s also something I’m facing as a team manager. Would be very interested to see how you cover it.

Regards,

Maria

Hello Maria
Many thanks for your comments. I will bear your comments in mind. As far as possible I will amend the story accordingly.

best regards ___ Holger

As a visual designer, I agree with Maria. I’d also like to expand her suggestion to talk about knowledge transfer in how IAs work with other teams throughout a product’s lifecycle. Since we’re picking on people ;-p let’s talk about how UX teams work with software developers to realize a product. Things can go very awry when we run up against impossibilities in time, abilities, or what have you on the engineering side. Sometimes budgets are cut and planned features go out the window. Or, sometimes developers have already created something in an exploratory phase on their own, and they need to be convinced that they aren’t going in the right direction to realize user and business goals. What are best practices for us to follow when working with other teams, manage expectations, and plan ahead/adapt to changing circumstances?