5 Lessons I learned in UX Design Clinic

How to work with team and deal with clients

1. To have a better design work, your team need to be work efficiently and collaboratively.

We could have signed a charter at our first meeting so that everyone would understand that it is inappropriate to do their own assignments on the meeting. But we just jumped directly to our work and not everyone was so involved in the collaboration.

We could have to think hard about how to create an atmosphere that encourages constructive criticism to bounce some ideas off each other. But when someone was presenting his or her idea, no one was there to point out its rough patches and we tended to fall in love with our initial idea.

We can also assign each role such as leader, generator, synthesizer, devil advocate, recorder to each member so that everybody can be involved in our discussion. Since we lacked a recorder, if someone could not attend the meeting basically he would lose steam and not know where to turn.

We could have summarized the interviews right after we have done them. But it was not until two weeks later that we started to annotate the notes and build the affinity wall. If we can encourage everyone to work more devotedly and efficiently, we can conquer the time constraints we were confronted with.

We need to figure out the best practice to improve the communication of a design team, allowing higher quality design with less waste of time.

2. Focus on one project rather than split your energy equally if you have limited time.

Our mentor suggested us to split into two teams and each team focus on one project, but we hesitated to change our track because both our two projects were so good that we didn’t want to give up any of them. However, since not everyone can devote double the time, the overall quality of our final project was compromised. For example, the visual style of ClariLegal was not coordinated among four separate functions due to the time constraints. We could also have more time to add the data management platform to NsportC if we only focus on one project.

Our initial strategy was to switch between two projects and focus on each one one other week, but it broke the normal flow of the project and we had to prepare our mindset to jump between two projects and it definitely wasted some time and energy. For example, the interviews we had done in the previous week were postponed two weeks later to be annotated. As the result of that, Clarilegal’s progress was lagging far berind NsportC due to the lack of clear design process as NsportC.

If we could be more agile and nimble and follow our mentor’s suggestion to split into two teams and each team focus on one project, we might build two more well-crafted products.

3. Designers have to understand the real needs of your clients so that you won’t become lost in the weeds and fail to focus on the big picture.

Our client of NsportC wanted to create an MVP prototype so that he could get some fundings from the investors. In that sense, our design shouldn’t delve into the nitty gritty but to create a big picture for our client ASAP. At our first meeting, the client told us a lot of features he wanted to realize, such as several problem sets with various levels of difficulty which can change based on the replies of the player and a data management platform which can export and import medical records easily. But it turned out, in the end, he just wanted to develop a concussion assessment tool at the current stage, but we failed to invite him to clarify his expectation of our team so that we wasted some time in searching the most scientific methods to assess the concussion.

The interesting thing was, our client didn’t want the tool to be scientific at all because he didn’t want to step on the toes of the professionals and be examined by FDA. As a Chinese student, I didn’t understand how troublesome it would be if a product couldn’t clarify its responsibility clearly. What I did was to follow the guidelines of iMedicalApps and try to develop the most scientific application with all the beneficial features as what I have done for my mindfulness app, but I had never thought that the client just wanted an app to walk through the basic function such as managing the teams, getting notifications of some players on the watch list, and getting access to the quick test within 5 minutes.

What I’ve learned since is that designers have to understand some business goals and techniques such as MVP model so that we can communicate with our client more efficiently.

4. It’s hard to convince your client what problems are worth solving and why.

My client of ClariLegal wanted to improve the “look” of comparison chart of different vendors but I was struggling if the simplified process that ClariLegal honored can help buyers to make well-thought decisions or not. In other words, I believed the task shouldn’t be Design a comparison chart that shows you all the vendors but help people to make well-though decisions efficiently.

But it’s hard to convince my client and even myself the why — the identification of real problems.

The clients who ask UX Design Clinic for help usually already come up with a solution and they think they understand the underlying problem way better than designers. What they ask for is just to flesh out the solution, i.e. functions, interaction, visuals, or user experience.

5. You can not always get access to the resources you want.

Our first client for NsportC has been a coach before and he seemed quite skeptical about the value of interviews and user testings because he thought he understood the process way better than us. As a UX researcher, I tried to persuade him that we need to bring more stakeholders on board, but he just invited several old friends who had been coaches ten years before and refused to help us to reach out to the local coaches and players. We could be more agile and proactive in finding the users by ourselves rather than waste time in waiting for our client’s responses. His unwillingness might be attributed to his marriage to his own ideas and he felt challenged by our constructive criticism.

Sometimes designers want to build the well-conceived product at our best, but we also need to assess and manage the expectations of our clients by inviting them to talk more about how we designers can help them and make sure we share a common ground.

Another workaround, as our mentor suggested, is to pick up some techniques from “101 Design Methods” such as role-play ideation or behavioral prototype. It would not only help us to make a better sense of what would happen on the field and walk in a mile in the coaches’ shoes.

Design Clinic is a great opportunity to implement our design techniques to real cases. I really appreciate the hand-on experience and team collaboration that it has brought us. Although I was faced with many problems, I enjoy the process of exploring the problem space and juggling different constraints under a tight deadline.

I have grown so much.