How I Work
First things first.
Establish the best way to communicate with your teammates.
What works best for each individual? Are they local or remote?
Establishing a rapport is key to a good working relationship.
Find common interests and delight in the differences!
Consensus
- Coordinate ideas with individuals before your meeting
- Get people’s real feelings by speaking with them 1:1 about the topic/issue.
- Get to know the people better (faster).
- Opposition can be identified early so there will be no confrontation in the meeting.
- When the meeting finally happens everyone knows what to expect.
- Doing daily “stand ups” is another way that I have seen work well.
- Have a centralized location for a project – so all can reference materials.
Requirements
- What is the challenge?
- Who is the Target Audience?
- Who is our competition?
- What is the schedule?
- Are there company guidelines?
- Are there industry standards?
- Who has final approval?
- What does success look like?
Process (Ideal)
RESEARCH (Before, During & After)
- Task Analysis
- Gather requirements
- Competitive Analysis
- Individual user studies
- Alpha and Field testing
DESIGN
- Brainstorming
- Wireframing / Workflows
- Mockups
- Meetings with Development
- Prototypes
PRODUCTION
- Written Specifications
- Meetings with Development
- QA
- User Feedback in Beta Incorporated into Production Release
Process (Reality)
The creative path is perhaps not straight, but it does have purpose: the end product. It can incorporate many of the items mentioned in the list above, but reality is that you don’t always have the luxury of time, or manpower to cover all these bases perfectly, so you might have to use your experience and seek out some “creative” ways of working. One example below.
- RESEARCH When only given requirements, ask many questions of the source and do competitive analysis to define your objectives.
- DESIGN A series of brainstorming/white-boarding sessions, using quick paper or interactive prototypes to validate progress.
- PRODUCTION A close knit team of designers and developers co-located discuss and fill out edge cases and QA each other’s work.
That all said, no two projects are the same.