Why being proactive with questions helps avoid last-minute design changes

Team members often don’t pay attention until it’s their turn to work

Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash

“I’d like to start the meeting by asking if Engineering has questions for UX,” I said, already knowing the answer.

There were only two possible responses:

• No one would respond since my Designs were too far in the future for Engineering
• A whole bunch of critical questions would come at once since Engineering started work on the Design

While this phenomenon isn’t horrible in isolation, it often leads to hasty, last-minute changes that hurt the user experience.

To understand why this occurs, you must understand the fundamental difference between how Design and fields like Engineering work.

Design is like sculpting, Engineering is like 3D printing

To explain why Design is fundamentally different, let’s talk about additive and subtractive manufacturing.

Many team members (especially engineers) operate like 3D printers with additive manufacturing. The idea is that you start from nothing and build something, layer by layer.