Barbarians at the Gates

How to Bring Engineers into Your UX Department in order to Lower Coordination and Transaction Costs and

Accelerate Product Development

Stephen M. James • @tweetllama • UX Department O!site

UXDS Architecture Team

UXDS Architecture Team

Introducing the UX Architecture Team:

user-centered front-end developers in your UX dept

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

UX Architecture Goals

Our team will enable rapid experimentation and

design iteration

Our team will increase collaboration between UX

designers and all FEDs

Our team will strengthen the link between UX and product

engineering teams

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.

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!

Frequent knowledge-sharing sessions on both UX and front-end topics, so everybody shares a base literacy.!

Minimize creating UI specs and PowerPoint presentations for meetings.!

Death to large spec PDFs!

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 !x issues earlier in the process.

We don’t want to just be the UX department’s product team.

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.

Some things to keep in mind...

The amount of useable UXA code that the product team can use varies by time.

The type of useable code that the product team can use varies by type of prototype.

The smaller the component we pass along the likelier it will aid the product team and make it into production for the upcoming release.

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.

Once upon a time, in an o"ce far, far way…

RPDs focus on what it should look and function like to the end user.

PEGs focus on slaying the tricky UI dragons and merging that code into production.

It’s not a fairy tale! This is our proposal, but we want to work with you to meet your needs.

!If you have suggestions, feel free to suggest an idea.

Let’s create a culture of learning, experiment, and fail fast!

Stephen M. James • @tweetllama • UX Department O!site