Exercise in re-aligning a team.
With my UX role at a digital agency, I recently got to work on the agency’s website re-design. I got involved as a UX designer at a stage where the early sketches from a design sprint along with the marketing team were done. Basic landing pages were wireframed. The focus was to release the website at a well-defined timeline. Given the complexity of agency work(read, putting out fires), this did not seem to move quickly.
My starting point was to work on user journey within the site. Our team of four was made up of UX, design, developer and a project lead. This ensured we communicated quickly with our client, in this case, the marketing team. After I sent across the approved pages to design, we moved to build simultaneously to make up the time within internal resources. Again, the priority on the project started to lag as we had new client work coming in.
To move things faster, the product owner decided to run a workshop with the development team. This was a brilliant exercise to take each page and break it down to its bare minimum component.
We used a physical print out of the website design and cut them up on each unit of the build. It was soon apparent which components were unique and which components were consistent. We worked through each unit and saw where the unit was repeated or needed to change according to its utility.
The workshop lasted slightly over one hour with the Scrum Master being involved. We created more value together by:
>Being up-to-speed with each member’s operation
>make changes to design if need be
>most importantly, keep consistency
I found this exercise interesting as we were able to make progress on the site build. It was a good place to start when the co-ordination between teams tend to take time and external priority tends to creep in.
Based on the time scale this was an easy place to hammer down issues which were difficult to pin down without consulting each other. The takeaway from this interaction was also to get all the team members on board with the vision of how the site had to look.
Having a workshop with UX, design, dev and scrum-to break down the components physically meant that there was less obscurity of the task on hand. This was a high-level breakdown to go deeper within each subcategory of the project.
The experience of physically breaking the website down to its components helps to bring our part of the job in focus.
Have you had a similar experience working with different teams? What is your team's favourite means to interact? I would love to know how you approached it?
