Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

User Experience: Bringing UX Design to an embedded team

If you’re a designer who wants to bring UX principles into your next project, whether it’s for a small project or for a larger team with multiple stakeholders, here’s some advice from my experience working with a variety of clients and design teams. If you find you’re really interested in this stuff, check out the resources at the end of this chapter for a list of articles and books I’ve found useful.

Study the organization you’re working with

Working in any kind of organization requires a certain taste for politics. As designers, we get this already; we’re used to having our work critiqued, and dealing with comments that we find, *ahem*, unhelpful. The trick to selling stakeholders on user experience design is, like visual design, in understanding its value to the organization and being able to back that up with hard facts. Speaking the language of the client also helps. This is where documentation comes in especially handy. If you can point to a specific objective that your approach will help meet, you’re well on your way to selling the idea.

Just as important as figuring out how to sell the idea of UX design to your clients is realizing when the client is a lost cause. In Undercover User Experience Design (New Riders Press), authors Cennydd Bowles and James Box offer some important red flags to watch out for when broaching the subject of user experience:

1. Design Disinterest. “Many organizations simply don’t care about design, ...