Getting Your Design Past the 36th Chamber of Engineers

A couple of weeks ago, Jared Spool talked about screening for the right participants. One of the responses to the article mentioned that for some of us, the difficulty came even earlier in the process: convincing internal teams that it was beneficial to get any user testing at all. I don’t imagine Robby Slaughter is the only person in this situation, though I hope that by now, it’s become less and less of an issue. I thought it would be interesting to touch on one area of that which is getting your design to remain as intact as possible through the development process.

In software and web development I’ve found the best way to interact with both product managers and engineers has been to speak in their language. That is, integrate the UI process in such a way that the stakeholders can relate it to their own existing processes and documents.

I separate these into three primary deliverables/phases: the requirements, the specifications and the code review. I’m sure others can think of additional ways to effectively communicate their design and ensure its execution. These are the ones I’ve found have worked most consistently across almost any project.

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