Why Every Software Team Should Have a Designer

They can help us prevent building stuff that no one will use through lab engagements to run user research every one or two weeks including every single member of the team - listening users get to learn how to ask open-closed questions and interact with users.

Listening to users makes one so humble and makes one see how often the assumptions about this idea thought to be true aren’t true at all.

User research participants can make the whole team realize the product they are building can spark the kind of like behavior change in people which is incredibly powerful.

Bringing meaning into the center of our team by empathizing with the users.

Every product starts with such uncertainty and chaos.

For example, Covid-19 tracking application: Designers collaborate with the engineers, architects, and scientists to come up with the kind of like messaging logic of who and when would be pinged under extreme circumstances, i.e. so many edge cases, dependencies, and daily changing official guidelines - the result is an application so easy to use for users.

It is not only about the use of interfaces but also internal team and organization processes and seeing what can be changed for the better.

For example, one wants to visualize data but the people that we need to input the data aren’t the people that benefit from it, such as timesheets - behavior change and making sure people that people stick with it is a part of the product and that’s when a designer can make a huge impact.

They are great writers and UX copywriting is a whole discipline in itself so the way that the text in an application is written matters so much, but it’s not only text but also telling stories through images - a team would never be short appealing mockups.