Summary: 82% of UX professionals collaborate with other team members on the deliverables they produce, in a wide variety of ways.

Creating and refining UX deliverables is typically not a solitary act, and we frequently see UX professionals working with other team members to create documentation and design artifacts. We recently ran a poll of 86 UX professionals to better understand if and how they collaborate with others to produce deliverables such as wireframes, mockups, or presentations. Our respondents had a variety of positions including visual designers, interaction designers, and UX researchers, in both internal and consulting roles.

Collaboration Is Common

In our poll, 82% of respondents noted that they collaborate with others on their deliverables either Often (52%) or Sometimes (30%), compared to only 18% that collaborate Rarely or Never. An 82%-vs-18% ratio is vastly more lopsided than most of the UX methodology issues we study: basically, collaboration is 5 times more common than solitary work on UX deliverables.

So why do people collaborate?

Other People = More Ideas

Here’s a typical problem for UX professionals: you start a project by working with business stakeholders to outline the requirements and then take off running with a single idea, iterating the design over and over. We often see UX team members develop one idea iteratively in wireframes, prototypes, mood boards, and comps, and then spend a huge amount of effort testing, refining, and presenting it to stakeholders until it shines.

However, it can save a lot of effort and time if you start with a few different ideas early in the process, and work on converging the best aspects into a single design that is good from the outset. When doing this, testing will uncover deeper insights, iterations will go more smoothly and happen faster, and budget (and precious time) will be saved. To make this process work as effectively as possible, you need to collaborate with others to generate ideas in the first place.

This is a theme that emerged in our survey: ideation and idea generation is one of the biggest reasons for collaboration with other team members, especially on design deliverables. Many respondents noted specifically that they relied on collaboration for divergent thinking, which is the process of generating multiple options and ideas before choosing a direction and refining it. One respondent expressed this clearly:

“I'll often do a wireframe in parallel with another person to ensure we get a couple of different ideas.”

The goal behind this activity is to avoid bias and create a more robust design after comparing multiple alternatives and converging upon a unified idea. When working with people outside the UX discipline (product owners, business analysts, engineers, and executive sponsors) eliciting multiple solutions to a problem also expands perspectives, and incorporates ideas “outside the box”.

Great, but how can you get busy people to take the time to collaborate like this?

Workshops Encourage Cross-Functional Ideation

In our survey, in-person workshops and design-studio activities were popular ways of getting a broad audience to participate, with respondents noting that whiteboard sessions and sketching charrettes enabled many different types of team members (including developers, business stakeholders, designers, and product management) to make themselves heard in the early stages of creating design deliverables. These meetings need not be complex, all-day affairs; an hour or two and some sketch paper can go a long way toward hearing the input of all stakeholders. They also have the added benefit of being dynamic, fun, and memorable for your stakeholders, which can cause the audience grow each time you hold a workshop. We offer training on running successful sketching and prototype sessions in our full-day Wireframing and Prototyping course.

Most respondents noted that these workshops typically took place in person, in some type of co-located space (such as a traditional office environment), rather than in a virtual, remote environment. However, remote tools such as Google Docs or screen sharing were also used to post early-stage deliverables and to request feedback and suggestions for improvement.

The “Four Eyes” Principle

Here’s another common deliverable pitfall: an interaction designer will work by himself on a prototype over and over and over, sanding down every rough edge, until he’s created a great experience for every scenario he can think of. Then, once he has gathered the project stakeholders to present his ideas, the very first question from an executive highlights a glaring hole, such as “what happens if people want to change the email address on their accounts?” He’s left feeling foolish at the front of the conference room, thinking, “how could I have missed something so basic?”

Collaborating on your design ideas can help prevent gaffes like this.

In our survey, 31% of our respondents noted that they showed their deliverables to other team members as a method of checking for biases, mistakes, and blind spots in their work. One designer specifically mentioned this practice as the “four-eyes principle” (or “four eyes are better than two,”) for finding flaws or omissions before showing a deliverable to a wider audience (especially business stakeholders and clients).

Another respondent noted that the four-eyes principle was also a way of gauging suitability of designs before doing usability testing. Why waste test users on discovering a usability flaw your colleague can spot? (It’s important to note, though, that multiple revisions of the same deliverable do not eliminate the need for usability testing once you’ve polished off the rough spots. Rather, this process ensures that the test users are used on researching deeper and more subtle issues.)

“Every team member is the first resource for evaluating user reactions. I also depend on the combined brainpower of the team to provide insight and keep me from becoming biased. I also test ideas with my family, friends, and sometimes the general public. This is all before organized user testing.”

Collaboration Is not Just for Design Deliverables

Collaboration is beneficial not only for design deliverables like wireframes, prototypes, and comps, but also for user-research deliverables, such as reports, presentations, and data analyses. Collaborating on these latter artifacts leads to more ideas, fewer blind spots, and a smaller workload. The evaluator effect, documented by Hertzum and Jacobsen in 2001, shows that evaluators who use the same usability method detect different problems in interfaces, so the more UX experts review your data, the more findings you will get. (Our course Measuring User Experience discusses the evaluator effect and its implications for qualitative user testing in more detail.)

Several of our survey respondents noted that they collaborated with other team members on analyzing data: either findings from usability testing or site-analytics data. Whether working together on affinity diagrams to categorize issues and notice themes, or simply reviewing videos from testing sessions together and debriefing, multiple collaborators can more easily notice subtle issues that may otherwise go overlooked.

Sometimes the collaboration also resulted in a lighter workload for individual team members; for example, a UX professional mentioned that his UX team split up the work of writing a usability report, with each person contributing a separate section of the report, which was later compiled together.

Who Should You Collaborate with?

In our survey respondents reported that they worked with different types of audiences to produce a stronger deliverable before presenting it to decision-makers. The top collaborators mentioned were engineers and developers, other UX professionals, product managers and business analysts. As one respondent put it, collaborators in different roles can help with different aspects of the deliverables:

“I collaborate with business/PMs/Product for feedback on business goals and success criteria, [and] I collaborate with developers for technical feasibility and development planning.”

The typical form of collaboration involved UX-team members working with business stakeholders (such as product/project management, and business analysts) to determine requirements and to review design ideas in an informal setting. Additionally, working extensively with developers helped assess the feasibility of the proposed solution, before finally presenting deliverables to executives and higher-level decision makers for feedback and approval.

Our study participants also collaborated often with other UX professionals, even if they weren’t necessarily part of the same team. Respondents noted that it was useful to have someone else within the discipline be available to bounce ideas off, even informally. Marketing team members and visual designers also had a small but vocal presence as deliverable collaborators in our survey, typically weighing in on matters of branding, business requirements, and aesthetics.

Clients and executive business stakeholders were rarely an active part of the collaboration process for creating deliverables in the early stages of creating deliverables; however, these audiences frequently provided feedback during the review and approval of the deliverable. This feedback, while not strictly a collaboration on deliverables, is a critical part of the iterative design process.

What If You’re All Alone?

So sad … and yet so common that we have an entire full-day course dedicated to helping “the one-person UX team.”

If you’re the only UX professional in your company or department, you can still benefit from collaboration to some extent. If there are other people in similar roles in other departments, then those colleagues can still be of help, even if they’re not intimately familiar with the intricacies of your project. (In fact, as we saw in this survey, a fresh perspective is one of the most valued benefits of collaboration.) Conversely, you can help them and simultaneously pick up new ideas while reviewing their deliverables.

Even if you’re truly the only UX professional in the entire company, there’s still value in collaborating on your deliverables with nonUX specialists, such as business analysts and developers, as discussed above. The more solitary you are, the more you need some kind of feedback. To stretch our analogy, maybe you’re only getting a three-eyes review instead of a four-eyes one, but that’s still better than only having had your own eyes on the draft deliverables.

Summary

Producing deliverables is, like many other UX activities, an increasingly collaborative process, with UX professionals frequently working to combine the efforts of crossfunctional teams. The benefits of collaboration range from eliciting more design ideas and validating findings to removing potential blindspots and reducing workload.

Common methods of collaboration include:

Getting input on goals and priorities from business stakeholders

Determining engineering effort levels from developers

Iterating with other UX professionals

Running design workshops with the entire team

Learn more in our full-day training course on creating effective UX deliverables.

Reference

Hertzum, M., Jacobsen, N. (2001). The evaluator’s effect: A chilling fact about usability evaluation methods. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 13, pp.421-443.