Shipping Greatness

Chapter 3. How to Build a Great User Experience

THE USER EXPERIENCE IS not just what your product looks like, it’s how it works, too. Shipping greatness means shipping a great user experience. If nobody can use your product, or people hate the way it looks, or if they can’t figure out how to log in, greatness is out of your reach. So even though you’ve hired or borrowed a talented user experience designer, you can’t pass the buck down the line and expect to keep shipping. You need to plan on sharing ownership of the user experience of your product. It’s not your job to solve all user experience problems; it is your job to ensure that your product provides the best user experience possible, and that means getting the best out of your design team.

To get the most out of your design team, seek first to understand design, then to be understood by your design team. You can start understanding design by understanding the varying roles of designers. After you know what each role does, the second thing you need to understand is how to evaluate designs so that you can have a meaningful interaction with your designer. After you know what to say, the third thing to understand is how to communicate with each design role effectively, which includes understanding how to review designs and provide feedback to the designers. The fourth and final element of understanding design is learning how to communicate with pictures, through simple wireframes and mockups that you can create in Photoshop or ...