Ride Together, Design Together: Bringing Collaboration to the Forefront of the Web Build

Good design is great collaboration. When building technical products, everyone on a project team is a designer in their own right. When your team can design together, from start to finish, you build a critical understanding of the problem that must be solved and the tools that must be used to solve it. 

Design "waterfalls", where a wireframe is tossed over the wall to a designer who tosses a visual design over the wall to a developer to implement and build is a flawed methodology in the technical world. Waterfall work removes key opportunities to refine, improve, and understand real solutions to complicated problems. 

More specifically, a UX designer that creates a prototype without an understanding of the technology that will be used to build it is missing out on a key opportunity to design a truly inclusive solution. A developer that builds a website without any interest in how good UI and design is missing out on growing their core knowledge of the site's user base. A visual designer that applies color and interactions to a gray box is missing out on the ability to create a visual language that supports the technical success of the project. In each case, collaboration is the missing piece. 

In this session, we will introduce a number of methods and tactics that will allow you to build a truly inclusive team - one that designs together from beginning to end. We will discuss the challenges that make collaborative design difficult and how to avoid those pitfalls. We will provide project examples to illustrate where design walls lead to failure and how removing those walls has led to success. This session is open to all levels of expertise on web projects: UX Designers, Developers, Project Managers, and Visual Designers are welcome and encouraged.