Macadamian Blog

Designers and Engineers Unite!

At Macadamian we have a marketing challenge that has me stumped. When we describe that our core competency is both in User Experience design and software engineering, we often get blank stares. 

In the software industry, most consulting firms focus on one or the other. For us, it creates a classic Trout/Ries positioning challenge - people want to place us in the development bucket, or the design bucket. Furthermore, most software organizations approach the link between UX design and engineering in the same way - they either contract out the design and develop the product in-house, they hire two separate firms, or they in-source it, meaning their design team is a separate entity, on the other side of the building, that designs the product and throws it over the wall to the engineering team. 

The trouble is, by looking at design and development as a serial process, most software companies are missing an opportunity to create better products. Tight collaboration between UX design and software teams, where the two teams work together from day-one to release, create more cohesive, and more desirable products. Here's why:

The Experience is the whole product

The user experience doesn't start and stop with the design. At every part of the development cycle, you have the opportunity to add to, or take away from, the customer experience. A brilliantly designed product can have a poor user experience if it responds sluggishly to input, or if it's simply buggy. Everyone needs to be thinking about the experience throughout the whole project. 

Different points-of-view fosters creativity 

In case you haven't noticed, designers, developers, and quality assurance people all think differently. If you can tap into those different points of view by involving more disciplines earlier in the process, you will create more ideas and more diversity of ideas, which will ultimately lead to better ideas to choose from. You also benefit from the knowledge that the development team has of new platforms and toolkits that may create new possibilities and new design directions you hadn't considered. Just as an industrial designer collaborates closely with materials engineers to learn about new composites that could allow for more elegant or lightweight designs, so should interaction designers collaborate closely with software engineers to learn about new technologies. 

Design happens right up to release

Whether you like it or not, design happens all through the development cycle. If you are following a model where the design team designs the product up front and hands it off to the development team, they won't design every single screen, and changes will happen. No good plan survives the battle, and no good design survives development. The development team will be making design decisions daily as they fill in the details and blanks left by the design team. If the design team isn't around to guide them, those decisions may or may not support a good user experience. 

You'll get there faster

When designers can get instant feedback from architects and engineers, you substantially reduce the amount of design churn. Think of the amount of time that is wasted when a design team has to wait until they've completed a full iteration and the next design review to get the "official" feedback from the development team that a design isn't possible, or would be too expensive to build. If you can create an environment where the designer can walk over to an architect and get that feedback on the spot, you've saved days, and over a project, maybe weeks. If the developers have to go through hoops to get back in touch with the design team and open a new PO to get for more detailed design during development, you've wasted more time.  

You'll have one team to manage

As the product owner, I'm sure you've had to try to coordinate handoffs and schedules between different disciplines. It can be a pain in the ass. One team is late and it pushes the other team's schedule. People are sitting idle waiting for deliverables. You're pushing for one team to be more responsive to the other. 

I'd like to take credit and say we were the first to think of this, but there are a few software companies that have tightly integrated, cross-functional teams that work on the project together from start to finish. Intuit is one, and so is Google, and their products (or most of them anyway) deliver a consistently good experience. Other disciplines like industrial design or automotive design have been working this way for decades. If you approach design and development as one seamless process, you will create better products faster.