Cooperation with other team members

Reading time: 2 min.
Author: Konstantin

Design Technologist is a very varied role, so you will need to be comfortable wearing a lot of different hats. As with other UX roles, communication and cooperation are the key, because one should be able to close the gap between designers, developers, and product managers at the same time. Design Technologists should be able to speak with various stakeholders and have the right skills to make the business work. Since it always takes some effort to understand the viewpoints of other team members, it will often require from you to be outgoing, sharp, confident to present your ideas.[1][2]

A Design Technologist often takes part with designers in group design activities (brainstorming, design critiques, user research, etc.). Therefore, it is particularly important to develop creative thinking, design skills and knowledge of design tools. During concepting, Design Technologists help designers understand technical restrictions and opportunities that are given to a project on the designer's ideas.[3]

One of the biggest challenges is to translate designer language to engineers, especially in waterfall product development. Cooperation between designers and Design Technologists creates valuable insights for further experiments, calculates a designer idea’s feasibility to be integrated with the user needs, technology opportunities and business requirements. Sometimes, basic details are not discussed by developers and designers because the first assumes that the latter are aware of technical problems when that is often not the case. It is common that a designer creates wireframes and hands them off to engineers, with no communication after the mock-ups are complete. This makes designers project living separately from technical constraints and sometimes they are impossible to implement. Furthermore, by the time the mocks have been coded, it sometimes does not look anymore like what the designer was thinking of. Minimizing such misunderstanding and miscommunication may help save time and nerves.[4][5][6][7]

Design Technologists are the first contact point for engineers when they need design help. They have an eye for design, and they speak the same language as engineers, understand their needs and restrictions. Thus, close cooperation with engineers aligns code with platform design and UX.[2][7]

Design Technologists also cooperate with UX researchers, planing and implementing UX studies together with them. Design Technologists should be able to produce prototypes, ranging from low to high allegiance, by supplying more real of the product and the higher quality of feedback than designer’s prototype in their design tools. Other tasks include gathering and evaluating user requirements, creating storyboards, process flows, and sitemaps, managing usability testing.[2][5]