Getting the right feedback, and managing priorities
My Two Cents on How to Improve Design Process
Working in a small design team supporting wide range of products, this might sound familiar to you — “All we need is some minor change in this one screen, can we get it done in two days?” or, “Can we review the new design tomorrow? It should be fairly simple.”… …
You might be wondering, “Why do people think my job (as a UX Designer) is so easy?”, “Why don’t they understand the complexity?”. Well, quite often the perception of what is required to get a job done, can be very different without much open communication. However, I found the bigger problem is often not explaining or understanding how complex a task is, but how the expectations and process are being set up.
Get the right feedback you are seeking for
Our two-year old UX team, like a fairly ‘new’ player joining the game, is in the process of establishing the team while driving some pretty big changes happening in the organization. With an opportunity to lead the design of a new service recently, I found quite often that the team was taken as a role who provides visual design service, or “UI screens”. Obviously, we need to continue putting more efforts in sharing with other teams — what is UX, and what design thinking is all about. At the same time, I realized it is also a result of how the team used to interact with others in the past, by often jumping right into high fidelity screens.
One of the early design review meetings I sat in, with the purpose of reviewing UX flows, turned out to be a two-hour long debate with people jumping around commenting on all kinds of visual elements. “Why this icon look so tiny?”, “Why the background has colorful gradient?”… It did not end up productive at all. I approached several team members with extensive knowledge and experience on design process after, and came to a consensus that we need to go back to the basics — information architecture (IA). The team had done it internally, by working through it on whiteboard, post-its, or flow charts, but never made it a standardized step or shared it with the broader team in those review meetings. The team has been suffering from on-going struggles of meeting super aggressive demands with limited resources. It had been absorbing unrealistic amount of requests, and got into an unhealthy stage. I realized it is not sustainable, and we need to take the initiative to make some changes.
We started with building a library as part of the design system to standardize the IA components, and making the IA flows as a “must have” step when approaching any new task. It helped the team shift focus back on the fundamental question of,
“What’s the problem are we solving?”
and limit the feedback at the early phase to the core experience itself - how it works rather than how it looks. At the following design review meetings with key stakeholders usually including engineers, product managers and designers, this approach helped the team get on the same picture, and uncover problematic areas that need to be addressed before moving onto hi-fidelity design. We (or the UX team) were able to get more constructive feedback, rather than personal opinions at the review meetings. It helped the process moving forward more efficiently for everyone.
At the beginning, we always got asked — “Are we going to review the UI at this meeting?”, and I found it was perfectly fine to say “No, we are going to focus on the IA today. Once we have consensus on it, we can move forward on the design and set up follow-up reviews.” It requires a constant dialogue, a proactive approach to get everyone on board, especially when changes are happening. Big lesson learned to me is, you will never know what feedback you are going to get, but you can always set up the expectations, and control what type of feedback you are getting.
Priority management
I have been reading Nir Eyal’s new book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Highly recommended if you are interested on behavioral science, or the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. There is a saying that,
“If you don’t plan your day, someone else will.”
I can’t agree more, and think the same applies to a team. If we don’t manage the priorities proactively, we will just end up spinning the wheel like a hamster, and never be able to accomplish what we should have focused on.
I remember how stressful I felt every morning back then, reading the never-ending emails from all different teams asking for help. Of course, everyone seems really good at making their request sounds more urgent and important than the others. But with the number of designers we have, it is a ‘mission impossible’ to accommodate all these requests, while keeping up the quality of work we deliver. I know I need to be the gatekeeper, otherwise the team will just burn out quickly, or we will end up compromise the quality. At the same time, we need a solution, to offload the pressure of filtering or validating requests from the UX team, and streamline the process.
To solve this problem, I had conversations with the leadership, internal team members, and cross-functional teams. It requires huge support from the management (which we fortunately have), and each individual team member to carry it through, being able to say no and help shift things back on track whenever needed. Also, it requires a close collaboration with cross-functional teams, especially with product management team in my case. I learned that it is not simply a job of one individual role, but a common ground that requires involvement and ownership from multiple partners. By ways of setting a priority level for each new task, tracking them in a live system that is accessible to all, breaking larger issues into smaller sprints, having regular meetings to go over the status, getting feedback and making adjustments along the journey, we are at a much better place today. It is still an on-going improvement, but a problem that can be solved and needs to be solved, to set up the team and the organization for success.
