The User Experience Team

After researching and writing my last post on Strategic UX Design, I started thinking more about how I've spent my time at the various organizations that I've worked for.  Early in my career I spent a good bit of time as a UI developer and later as a researcher and project manager for UI-intensive projects.

If I map my experience onto the 5 Competencies of UX Design diagram from UX matters, I've heavily invested my time into Interaction Design and Prototype Engineering with quite a bit of Information Architecture recently, and scattered, intense periods of Usability Engineering and Visual Design.  In terms of UX Strategy, I've some time on it at the beginning of each project. However, it's often hard to maintain a focus on strategy within the context of the daily grind of software design and development.

It's not surprising to note that my most successful and productive periods of UX work have come while working within a good team.  When two people are working well together, it can more than double your productivity.  The same can be true (to a lesser extent) for larger teams if you have quality people and good leadership.

In some of my past projects, I've been lucky enough to work with trained and experienced UX professionals.  In other cases, I was able to recruit and develop folks with other backgrounds such as documentation, testing, UI software development, business analysis and graphic design.

In this post, I want to capture my model of the roles a good UX team. Often two or more of these roles are filled by a single person (based on resources available for UX design), but to the extent that the roles can be filled by quality specialists (perhaps borrowed from other groups in the organization), you can expect to see corresponding performance improvements.

• UX Lead: (objectives, strategy, total customer experience, interface with other leads [dev, qa, marketing, sales, senior management?], UX process and integration, manage team, prioritization)
• Business Analyst/Research: (understand and document business needs/rules/requirements, research and document information architecture and terminology, help develop value map, interface with customers, other business analysts, documentation team, marketing and sales)
• Interaction and Visual Design: (UI logical framework, look and feel standards, contribute to UI specifications/prototypes for each UI element (screen, control, etc.), ensure designs meet measurable objectives, interface with marketing and dev)
• Usability Testing/Research: (set up and run usability tests/research, document findings, track and document usability issues / feature requests, interface with QA team, overlap with UI functionality testing, ensure that UI conforms with specs and standards)
• Prototype/UI Engineering: (develop UI framework and reusable components, rapid prototyping of new designs, help translate new designs into production code, interface with dev)

Note: I referenced the excellent resource, 5 Competencies of UX Design, as I was writing this up.  You should expect to see a good amount of overlap.

Not sure if this doodle adds anything to the post, but it was fun to draw. :-)