Improving How We Design at Scale with Multidisciplinary Teams

by Jared M. Spool

If we rely on our UX team to make every design decision, then that team will become a bottleneck. That’s not going to work. Our team can’t possibly scale to handle every decision, especially as design becomes critical for our organization’s success.

We will need our partners from development, product management, and other key stakeholders to also make design decisions, using the lens of good user experience. They’ll handle decisions our team can’t get to, and we need them to make those decisions as if our team was involved.

It’s all the rage to talk about having multidisciplinary teams participate in the decision making. Yet, we rarely talk about how we empower folks from those other disciplines to make smart decisions at every stage.

In the All You Can Learn library, Kim Goodwin, Megan Grocki, and Leah Buley have great insights on how we can get more out of our multidisciplinary teams.

As you watch these seminars, you’ll want to focus on these key points:

Boosting Research and Design Adoption

photo Kim Goodwin

Kim Goodwin

Kim shares a fascinating model that shows how an organization’s culture falls into one of four categories. In this seminar, she walks through how we’ll need to approach our co-workers differently, depending on which culture we’re in. That’s essential for ensuring we frame how we work with the members of the multidisciplinary team.

Watch Now | 75 minutes

Talk To Me: Involving Non-Researchers in Customer Insights

photo Megan Grocki

Megan Grocki

Megan did exactly this at NASDAQ. As you watch this seminar, you’ll see how she used consensus-based approaches to focusing on research, and how she made the results available to the team. We love how she got others involved in the process, which was essential to her success.

Watch Now | 30 minutes

Research & Design for the UX Team of One

photo Leah Buley

Leah Buley

Even though Leah’s talk is mostly aimed at the solitary UX person in the organization, her techniques are valuable to teams of any size. She has great tools—the UX questionnaire, a project plan, a strategy workshop, and sketching—that create opportunities for others to participate and contribute to the user experience work.

Watch Now | 88 minutes

Get the essential tools for designing at scale

You get immediate access to Kim Goodwin, Megan Grocki, and Leah Buley’s expertise when you subscribe to UIE’s All You Can Learn Library. For just $29 per month, you can start watching these key UX seminars right away. (It’s easy to sign up, you can cancel without penalty, and it’s 100% guaranteed, so there’s no risk.)

Subscribe to UIE’s All You Can Learn Library.

About the Author

Jared M. Spool is a co-founder of Center Centre and the founder of UIE. In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new design school in Chattanooga, TN to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. They created a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared’s decades of UX experience with Leslie’s mastery of experience-based learning methodologies.

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