5 Tips for Building a Design Process for Larger Teams
Discover Mariana Lopez’s tips for crafting effective design processes for larger teams. Embrace flexibility, prioritize improvement, and foster teamwork.
Our guest for this episode was WANDR’s Lead Strategist, Mariana Lopez. She has over ten years of experience in building products, working on user research, usability, and interaction in design in web and mobile applications. Mariana has a masters from Carnegie Mellon for Human-Computer Interaction and has also taught as a university professor on human-computer interaction and research. Here are five tips Mariana shared for building a design process for larger teams.
1. Be flexible
Plans are made to be broken. Your team might have a road map for the year, but be flexible when things change. Don’t let your plans be the only roads you take. Document your decisions and why you made them, and have a retro. Answer the questions of whether they were good calls or bad calls and avoid mistakes moving forward.
2. Improvement over innovation
If you’re going to improve your product, put slight improvement over innovations. It might be less sexy to sell, but you might get more retention. Focus on making the products better.
3. Work as a team - the whole time
Give enough information to the whole group about who they’re developing for and designing for. Good communication and enough information will help build trust within the team. Everybody wants to work on something that has value, so take advantage of that!
"Sometimes you can be so invested in getting those designs out or making that conversation or generating something new that you forget there’s an actual human being at the end of your products. And that’s who we should be constantly focused on."
4. Get everyone involved
Involve everyone in the team from the early planning stages. Sometimes, developers or designers might be briefed much later. However, sharing information before the design and development process starts is much more productive. Why is the team doing this? What is the ultimate goal?
5. Think about the user
Never forget who the user is. Listen to the people using the software. Ask your clients how they feel and what changes they would make, and investigate why they want to make those changes.
Final Thoughts
Working in larger teams might sound harder, especially if they’re working remotely. However, great goals can be achieved by setting up processes, having precise information, and working as a team. Share the correct insights, prioritize communication, and never forget what your client and user are looking for.
Check out our Podcast Episode 4 on Building a Design Process for Larger Teams with Mariana Lopez
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