Beyond Wireframes: Empowering Long-Term Project Success

At some point, the UX designers wrap up and hand over, and the project team implements, maintains, expands, and continues the work. Often this is quite an undertaking, as team members deal with their day jobs as well as constantly shifting priorities. It can be challenging for teams to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, foster the "big picture" over the long haul, and build on the UX work that was done. With one presenter coming from a UX background and one coming from the client side, we discuss practical ways UX experts can help set the project team up for long-term success and maintain the value of the UX investment. UX practitioners will hear specific ideas about how to provide support, empowerment, and the needed resources that will be useful long after they've moved on to other things. Project team members will hear what they can do to continue to sustain the quality and tell the stories that advocate for users.

More insights

Project communications

Jade Davis

Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.
Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.
The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation

Good facilitation skills are essential for many IA tasks and projects. The ability to successfully guide internal colleagues as well as external groups to shared, valuable outcomes serves a wide range of project needs – achieving stakeholder and team consensus, creating a clear vision for IA strategy, refining a taxonomy, to name just a few. This IAC2019 workshop builds activities around real-world scenarios from the presenters' own experiences that participants can use to plan for and guide their own work.
Know Thyself, and To Thine Users Be True: Understanding and Managing Biases that Can Influence UX Work

In her UXPA 2018 session, Karen Bachmann explores ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.
Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

In this session, Duane Degler helps association executives think about how we can better use roadmaps to plan our technology journeys and keep everyone in sync, and provides valuable insights to help coordinate organization and technology goals across parallel initiatives and departments.
User Experience Design Considerations for Multi-Museum Online Collaborations

In this MCN2016 session, Duane Degler and Lesley Humphreys share human-centered user experience considerations and requirements that pertain specifically to the challenges faced by collaborations among multiple collections, sites, and institutions.
Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.
Keeping the Vision Alive: UX Leadership in Long-Term Projects

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.
Integrating UCD with Requirements Engineering: Improving Processes, Formats, and Communication

User-centered design practitioners are skilled in eliciting user needs and translating them into design. However, our methods are sometimes poorly integrated with requirements engineering. This panel discussion presents practical approaches to coordinating UCD with other types of activities involved in the creation of requirements.
Sharing the Vision = Designs that Get Built

For user-centered designs to be successfully implemented, the stakeholders and members of a multidisciplinary project team must reach a shared understanding of the problem and the solution. This article explores ways of sharing information between usability specialists and technical team members who are using object modeling techniques based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We illustrate points where UCD deliverables can connect with UML deliverables, and vice versa, to help a project team create and communicate a shared vision.