I’ve mentioned before that I have a strong interest in internal, reflective experience design – not just designing for end users and customers but also designing for the project team who are developing products and services for end users. I believe that providing project teams with tools, frameworks, templates and processes that have been professional designed from a UX perspective will not only result in a happier, more productive and more efficient team but also be reflected in the quality of the developed product.
I tweeted recently that I intentionally put mistakes in my work to encourage people to interact with it. Dan Saffer refers to “seams” in his book Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices. He’s referring to released products that hackers and developers can then disassemble and re-purpose through, but I like the term and think of it when producing wireframes, strategies, documents etc.
How can a document have seams? Why would you intentionally share a document that has mistakes?
I recently developed an internal attitudinal survey designed to benchmark current opinions and sentiments to form part of a business case for further project work. When I developed the first draft I made sure I didn’t perfect it. I intentionally didn’t review the questions too carefully and made sure there were obvious opportunities for improvement with the research design. When I say “mistakes” I don’t mean typos – I mean leaving obvious gaps where people can comment and provide their input. It doesn’t matter if had already thought of what they suggest – the idea is to lower the barrier for participation and prevent people saying “It looks good enough” and just accepting it as is.
But won’t this affect people’s opinion of your professionalism and expertise? Yes … and no.
Initially, it may look like you’re sloppy in your work, that you send around drafts prematurely without thinking things through properly – but once you educate people on collaborative, iterative design and they see the quality of work you produce as final versions then I’m sure that initial impression will be negated. For user experience designers there’s a strong emphasis on the process, of facilitation and leading ideation sessions. We’re comfortable with presenting things half-baked in the form of prototypes and I think we should expand that idea.
Once a team get their foot in the door with collaboratively critiquing an idea the collective intelligence they can bring to bear will obliterate anything you could hope to achieve on your own but sometimes its just getting them over that first hurdle, to reach for their red pen and start scribbling over your work.
Things like this help contribute to intentionally designing a positive, collaborative experience for project teams – helping people engage in robust conversation and debate. In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni lists “fear of conflict” as a common dysfunction. Don’t be afraid to let team collaboration to stray into conflict and constructive argument because the team, the experience and the outcomes will all benefit.
As I said earlier, having seams and mistakes in documents and work you share with your colleagues doesn’t mean being sloppy with grammar and presentation. It’s about the content and providing people with a way in, not delivering something that is so polished that people feel bad taking a red pen to it.
Show your working! In fact scribble your afterthoughts on your own work before you send it around to your team. I submitted a redesigned home page for my organisation’s wiki a few months ago and I plastered virtual Post-It Notes on the Balsamiq wireframe as conversation starters. Most people don’t want to be the first to write on the whiteboard, but once you start things off others will feel more comfortable adding to it or changing what you’ve written and drawn. Make drafts look like drafts, not final documents.
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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This makes sense. In a team situation everyone has their own idea of how a document should be developed. If the first draft you provide is actually the 4th you might find that you were smoothing the edges off something that is about to be completely scrapped. Start by getting consensus on the outline before agonising over the detail!
That’s right. A team should be a singular collective, not a collection of individuals … but everyone working on their own, squirreling away and then presenting a finished, polished product without involved their co-workers makes establishing that oneness difficult, and whilst you might not respect the talent and experience of your co-workers, recognise that at the very least their indisputably unique perspective can bring something to the table you cannot.
Yes, I love Balsamiq’s little post-it-note templates. Used them in wire-framing a lot. Interesting article, made me re-think my strategy – I always aim for “perfection” at every stage (obviously an unachievable goal to begin with) but what you suggest makes a lot of sense.