No man can know all. And it’s the same for UX designers. Collaboration is a top skill for UX designers who work in agencies or large departments if you want to be successful.

Collaboration is a vital UX designer skill as it helps you communicate more efficiently with clients and stakeholders to ensure the resulting product meets both business goals and user expectations.

Working in close quarters with developers and content strategists is also the norm for this type of job. Collaboration skills will be invaluable when the time comes for handing off your designs to other departments.

What happens in the absence of collaboration between the UX designers and the rest of the team?

If a lack of collaboration between user experience designers and the rest of the team, the following problems arise:

Wasting Time

When the designs are technically infeasible or not practical and are not implemented or partially implemented, and the desired result is not obtained, time is wasted.

Extra effort

Additional efforts from developers and other team members are required. To find technically feasible design solutions, especially when iterating the design if design errors or useless results occur.

Wrong estimation time

Lack of collaboration between UX designers and the rest of the team negatively affects the estimated times of development and completion of projects resulting in delays and sometimes having to re-plan to be implemented correctly, which requires a lot of effort, time, delays delivery of the project, and sometimes failure.

Design inconsistencies

Lack of Collaboration Creates Design Inconsistencies By not communicating designs correctly and properly between team members. And it can start to build up over time, which also negatively impacts the user experience.

What are the top difficulties UX designers are facing in teamwork?

From the above, we find the importance of collaboration between the UX designers and the rest of the team. To have a good collaboration, must be overcome the challenges that UX designers are facing in teamwork.

Here are the top challenges facing the UX designers and possible solutions:

1. Insufficient cooperation between the team in the planning stage

It should be planning for the output of a timetable that includes the upcoming tasks and new features scheduled in sync with developers. Designers and developers will focus on this feature at different times, as only finished designs should enter the development phase. Designers always have to be ahead of developers, but there can be times when you need to give the developers something. It can be very stressful and hard to do in a meaningful way, so having clear and well-defined processes is crucial.

Solutions

Schedule weekly or daily meetings for quick check-ins to share existing processes, modify existing steps, or add new ones. Schedule discussions with the team from time to time to identify the weakest parts of the road and improve your workflow by solving these issues. And we agree with the team on a clear definition of what has been done and a ready definition.

2. Misconceptions about UX design work

Some developers are not interested in design work and consider it an extra burden to deal with. This can lead to us not understanding our goals and the way we think as UX designers do. It is also possible that they have had a bad experience with UX designers in the past.

Solutions

Explain the mental process and reasons behind decisions when presenting designs, share the UI patterns and best practices you considered in the design process. And invite developers for usability tests or in parts of the creative process, sketching, wireframing with brainstorming sessions as they often bring valuable insights and ideas from a different perspective.
At least share the insights with them. This can be an insightful, exciting experience if they’re not familiar with the user-centered approach.

3. Wrong implementation due to misunderstood design

Suppose design discussions don’t happen with the developers’ team throughout the design process. In that case, more explanations will be needed to make sure everything is clear about the design decisions and how the developers should be working on the interface.

Solutions

Decide on the logic, naming conventions, design system building methods early on. Guide the devs toward component-based development. Through define precisely what deliverables are needed from the design side.

Finally, Every member of a team has different skills, expertise, and talents. When all the members collaborate, they can utilize their experience, knowledge, and skills to achieve the shared goal. Also, the collaboration fast tracks project deliveries as employees can combine their strengths and expertise to get things done. A team might solve a problem that would have taken a single employee week to resolve within a few hours as everyone can employ their unique skills and viewpoints to get things done faster.

So, without collaboration skills, working effectively with large teams and being successful on large projects is impossible; This is why every large company relies on hiring employees who have excellent collaboration skills.

If you are looking for UX designer jobs, look through available vacancies on Jooble