What Makes a Good Designer 3 : Collaboration
I set “collaboration” as the topic for this closing article of “What makes a good designer” series. The reason is that as designers, users are the evaluators of our work. However, they won’t use a mockup from some Sketch file, but the end product we ship to them. Therefore, a big part of designers’ responsibility is to collaborate with other roles, solve problems together and deliver the best experience possible to users.
In this article, I would like to talk about the roles that designers usually collaborate with. Also, what makes a good designer in the eyes of other roles such as product managers, engineers, copywriters, design managers, etc.
Step 1: Understand the designer role
In most cases, the essential role of designers in a multi-functional team is the solution provider. Your team is expecting creative, balanced, and feasible design work that can solve problems. And you are the one who makes decisions on what to deliver to end-users. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t need to participate in the discovery or iterate phase. On the contrary, you should highly involve yourself in these two phases, use your learnings and insights for creating solutions.
Step 2: Coordinate with other roles
Coming up with solutions is teamwork. As a designer, we need to have excellent coordination skills to involve other roles along the way. First, identify which role’s expertise is usually required and helpful in each part of the design process. Then co-work with them and speak their languages. For example, when choosing ideas, consult engineers about the viability. That will avoid surprises during implementation. Another part of coordination is to control the pace of projects, communicate frequently with other roles, and constantly prioritise your work. Overall, being a good coordinator makes everyone feels that you listen and value their contribution.
Step 3: Meet expectations of other roles
“What makes a good designer from your perspective?”
Product manager
- Driven by business: I would like to work with designers who also driven by business. This means identifying a win-win situation for both business and users, and connecting design to company objectives.
- Research capabilities: When approaching a topic, designers should communicate with other stakeholders and dig deeper to find known as well as unknown problems.
- Design for long term: Good designers can translate fluffy ideas into something tangible. Moreover, they don’t come up with a short-term quick fix. Instead, they see the big picture and design for the long term and execute with a clear plan.
- Keep me in the loop: Designers and product managers are best buddies. I would like to work with open and communicative designers who update progresses proactively and ask for help sooner than later.
Engineer
- Basics knowledge of software engineering: Designers should know the limitations and cost to implement different solutions. And come up with a scalable and feasible solution that is the best at that time.
- Technical performance influences UX: Understand the basics of the software system and consider performance issues during design. Think from loading time to how user data is stored.
- Iterative thinking: The pursuit of perfection is a valuable quality for designers, but it doesn’t mean getting things straight in one shot. Designers should know the problems to solve in the current iteration, collect user feedback, and gain insights for the next iteration.
- Well-documented design specifications: It is not efficient when I have to reach out to designers for missing specifications, right during implementation. Designers should provide a detailed design specification with all the coroner cases well-defined.
Copywriter
- Content design thinking: Involve copywriters in the early stage of ideation and consider content design as part of the design solution. Always communicate proactively about their ideas and open for feedback.
- Have something visual: Designers should always prepare something visual to help me understand the story better and drive the conversation forward. It is hard to imagine without something tangible.
- Make symbols for copies: Often, one copy can appear in many places in a design file. It would be nice that designers make symbols for one copy so when I make a change, it changes everywhere.
Data scientist
- Understand algorithms: When a solution uses algorithms, designers need to understand the algorithms to make their design work well. Also, designers should know available algorithms and use them flexibly when comping up with new ideas. Most of the time, algorithms are business-driven. But designers should also contribute to building up an algorithm with user-friendly ingredients.
- Design for experimentation: Sometimes designers are designing experiments that can generate insights and move a project forward. That requires designers to understand what to validate, what are the metrics and design a solution that can best access hypothesis.
- Design for data collection: Good designers think about how to collect as much data possible when designing so that I can generate insights afterward. Also, the quality of the data collected is very important. Designers should know how to design in a way that users gave useful and informative answers.
User researcher
- Objectivity: Good designers would stay neutral with their design and not attached to them. When reviewing test results, this quality enables designers to accept feedback and come up with a better solution.
- Land research insights on products: Designers are the user representatives. They should proactively seek user research insights and know them by heart. Whenever possible, translate these insights into design solutions and make sure a problem is solved.
- Think big and small: During the early stage of concept development, I would like to see that designers can think big and provide me inspiring low-fi prototypes for asking users’ opinions. While in the final stage, for usability test, I need accurate and 100% functional prototypes.
Step 4: Manage up
Besides managing the expectations of our peers, we also need to manage up — understand your role from the design manager perspective.
- In design teams: Be proactive, team player, supportive, willing to give and receive feedback, share learnings, help your managers achieving their objectives.
- During 1:1 with your manager: Give concise information, get to the point, bring clarity, propose solutions when putting out problems, and keep your managers in the loop as passing work and ideas. Be prepared for every meeting and follow up about the things discussed.
- As a designer: Take great responsibility in improving the user experience of the products you are working on. At the same time, grow business and accomplish goals with your team. Understand the role of the designer in product development.
- As an individual: Be independent, reliable, self-reflective, and always looking for ways to improve. Be pragmatic and drive for innovations. Have great motivation and be happy with your work.
Special thanks to Apporv, Amit, Ronnitte, Ruikun, Selena and Yimeng in helping me put everything together.
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Other articles about being a good designer:
A design method mind map for designers at all levels:
About product design philosophies:
