Team up for better UI/UX designs

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Have you ever imagined why many popular sports like football and cricket play in teams? This is because not every individual is built the same and they may not possess all the skills necessary to win the game. And just like in sports, where every team member has a complementary skillset, UI/UX design is also a product of teamwork.

Teamwork is the cumulative result and synergy of the best inputs contributed by each member. Think of it as connecting the dots! Carefully and progressively connecting these dots can establish a robust procedure for everybody to work along.

Due to limited resources, small-scale UI/UX design agencies require their designers to work on multiple tasks. In such cases, the designers may lack the expertise. They alone have to do the research, ideate, design, and then iterate. And the result? A substandard product.

Every team member has their strengths and limitations like a normal person. Working in a team with collaborative efforts and a novel approach ensures the best results almost every time.

If you are someone who is a part of the UI/UX team, keep reading further to understand how teamwork can bring out the best results in your organization!

Why teamwork is important?

The combined efforts of researchers, designers, writers, visualizers, and developers contribute to a successful UI/UX project.

Every team member needs to understand each other’s goals to realize and bridge the gap between them.

In fact, as per Zippia, 3 in 4 (75%) surveyed employees rate teamwork and collaboration at work as “very important.” This means that if every member has been allocated tasks according to their expertise, it becomes easier for them to coordinate and collaborate with clear communication.

Companies or agencies that believe in cost savings by hiring fewer people and assigning more tasks to them. It may work in the short run, but it is detrimental to both – employees and the company in the long run. Such practices can also rob away a valuable pool of knowledge and diverse ideas, which helps in creating appropriate solutions.

In the end, a project would become futile due to delayed results. For instance, if a developer and a design team are working cohesively, they may have a fair idea of each other’s contributions & grunt work.

Benefits of working in a team

For any organization or individual, the notion of working in teams has a strong connection with overall productivity. 

Please look at the rundown below where we have listed said perks. 

Clarity of responsibilities

Working with a group of people primarily reminds you of what exactly you are looking to accomplish. 

As discussed previously, working in a team helps every member to understand their daily goals, which stem from the clarity of understanding each other’s responsibilities. Not only that, cohesive teams usually understand the task complexities and make everyone’s lives easier. Such interpersonal communication eliminates task redundancy and promotes early task completion ratios.

Such benefits of working within a team will drive your business for the future and prove to be an uplift in increasing your earning potential. 

Learn more than just Skills

UX design teams are a congregation of professionals from different backgrounds – research, product design, marketing, psychology, and development.

So if you work on a project in such a team, you will get to learn several new things from each of these professionals.

For example, if you are a designer, you will get to know what things researchers ask their respondents, which psychological factors are at play, how the product will contribute to revenue, and so on.

But if you are alone, you will miss those opportunities.

Working in teams is a great way to learn practical things quickly and stay relevant as the digital world progresses rapidly. Not just the knowledge, you will also improve your communication, time management, task prioritization, and interpersonal skills.

Individual growth opportunities

Since it is established that teamwork is the crucial step behind every successful project, let’s understand how it supports individual growth as well.

Once there is a clearer idea of responsibilities, every member starts understanding the nature of their teammate’s work.

This opens up an opportunity wherein they can learn new skills apart from their existing ones.

Such an individual growth opportunity boosts collaboration, time management, conflict, and resolution management skills leading to a striking project for your UI/UX design clients.

Decision on hiring third-party services

In order to get a fair idea of your project onboarding capabilities, a full-fledged in-house resource assessment may work wonders! At this stage, you can easily identify if your team requires guidance or it exhibits a problem-solving approach.

Working with the entire team, you can decide whether or not you need to hire the unbiased expertise of a third party in the project.

The collaboration of any two dedicated teams would prove to be the collab of a lifetime!

With an in-house team, you will be familiar with the process and people involved. Whereas, with a third-party collaboration, you are bound to get timely work exactly how your client desires.

Embracing the change

At times, clients come up with a different requirement altogether or want to re-think the design fundamentally.

In such cases, if only one person is handling it, it becomes challenging to think from a different perspective. Whereas, if there is a dedicated team member to think on every aspect of the issue, it becomes easier to develop a unique solution.

Regardless of what platform you work on, whether a design, application, or any interface, understand that these are all bound to change.

In fact, your initial/base plan, the flow of work with the concerned teams, their inputs, and the industrial grounds may keep changing! These changes don’t really have to be a turn for the worse.

Embracing these changes helps identify the project’s pain points, which acts as a significant benefit of having department-wise expertise.

Building a company culture

The teamwork among every department paves the way towards innovation.

All the unique solutions that work to resolve disruptions would be helpful in future projects. Team spirit and collaboration within the teams induce human values of honesty and empathy while enhancing the value of teamwork.

All these instances lead to forming a close-knit and well-cultivated company that resolves issues right away for its clients and has impressive team collaboration capabilities.

Ultimately, it opens up a wide range of opportunities for scaling up in the future.

Teamwork = improved work quality & efficiency

When we talk about teamwork, it becomes evident that multiple factors improve the work quality that any UI/UX agency delivers and the overall efficiency of the involved teams.

UI and UX are complementary, no doubt.

Although if seen individually, both these concepts can be tricky and become quite abstract as there are literally hundreds of aspects to dissent, right from research, interaction design, visual design, and more.

Teamwork acts as a catalyst in building the foundation blocks of an organization.

Practising the same will work for the best of the company and as individuals to inculcate values of trust, honesty, brotherhood, empathy, and more.

One of the easiest ways to just blend in with your team is to showcase your real emotions. One of the easiest ways to blend in with your team is to showcase your real emotions. Everyone else is just like a normal human who gets uncomfortable opening up, tries to give their best and wants nothing but the best for the projects. They, too, have a human side that possesses likes and dislikes.

Practice patience, listen to your co-workers, empathize with them to understand what motivates them and recognize what impacts their work in any scenario. These habits will foster effortless communication channels between you and them.

The more complex the problem, the greater the need to divide it into smaller tasks for a clearer delegation. Doing so will develop a system wherein every team member on the horizontal level is working parallelly on a single project with different points of view.

How and with whom should you work in a team?

Firstly one needs to comprehend that within a studio you are bound to have a diverse pool of skills in the same department.

A UX team cannot be treated the same as a developer. You can make better decisions with proper calculations, once you acknowledge the diversity of resources available.

Every team has a mission statement and a shared set of pragmatic principles that the team adheres to. When a project involves multiple team members, the collaboration proves to help set up clear role boundaries and enhance individual focus.

Working within defined teams is a setting where each person is zeroing only on the one thing they are best at. This is done by simultaneously keeping up with the pace with which the project is running.

A UI-UX design project is honestly a team sport in action! Every task is interconnected. People either prefer to merge the job or have a clear division of labor. Here are some ways to boost teamwork in your UI/UX agency:

Brainstorming sessions

A brainstorming session is an excellent and high-energy approach to kick off a project. All ideas are encouraged, notions are valid, and there is no hierarchy in such a session.

Brainstormers should be encouraged to include other people’s ideas as they progress from one to the next. This style of approach invites everyone to participate and is inclusive. It’s a great approach for any project to have a brainstorming session with activities like brainwriting, mind mapping, individual and group brainstorming, or any other activity that will let the creative juices flow!

Trust-building exercises

Team members must be able to rely on and trust each other. For instance, let them show a willingness to hand off a piece of a project that they feel proprietary about. Or let them believe that someone else will make a deadline instead of themselves. All these are significant examples of trust.

Respect for your teammates’ professionalism and effort is a prerequisite for trust.

When you have trust, every team member is free to pursue their job with laser-like focus, knowing that their teammates will handle their respective aspects of the project or effort.

Sharing expertise

Team players who are willing to share their resources, knowledge, and expertise with others are known as strong team players.

Rather than keeping cards close to one’s vest, collaboration entails being transparent about processes, exhibiting efficient methods, and accepting the fact that an individual can only succeed if the team succeeds. This collaborative approach benefits all participants.

Sense of adjacency

People in a team situation must play to their strengths and “fill in the gaps” where the team most needs it.

On a cooperative writing project, for example, one person may be excellent at conceptualizing ideas while another has a sharp eye for proofreading final articles.

The aggregate power of the team as a whole is stronger when everyone on the team employs their greatest skills and picks up slack where others may be lacking.

Open channels of communication

Good teammates are aware that someone else may have a better idea, method, or process and are willing to consider it.

That doesn’t mean that one individual should impose their agenda on the rest of the group. Still, it does mean that everyone is open to assessing a scenario and devising best practices that meet the project’s overall goals.

Conclusion

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” — Henry Ford.

With evolving thought processes and workflows in the UI/UX design agencies, it has become essential to put a light on how we can swiftly ace the projects with teamwork.

There is an absolute joy in seeing things come together successfully, especially when you know the backstory and with people with diverse skills from different departments. It is making dreams come true together!

We know that armed with the right set of teamwork and tools, one can face any iteration or any challenges along the way.

At Octet Design Studio, we believe in the superpower of teamwork that brings us closer to achieving our central goal of evolving as a UI/UX design leader.

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