Plan Productive Conversations

Visual Communication

Recently we have recruited Michael Stumer, an experienced web designer from Australian origin. He has quite wide perspectives about the role of web designers in the marketing of our products like website, web applications, and mobile applications. In his introductory speech with our teams, he described web designers as visual communicators for the brand. According to him we web designers are creating one sort of “Corporate Memory” through various documentation and assets.

After his speech Amanda, a fresher in our team of web designers, approached me and initiates discussion on our role in marketing. I explained her that how we are creating visual artifacts such as sketches, wireframes, various UI components to explain our thoughts and invite others to comment on them.

Collaborative Product Development Process

Since Amanda was newbie in our highly sophisticated web development processes, I have to explain things in bit simple manner so she can understand the iterative development process where collaboration is a base of the pyramid of branding. Today we have instant messengers to arrange an online conference with other team members and other stack holders of the product/website like programmers, QA teams, and marketing team, which is carrying research on the products, its target audiences, and running various tests.

Different Terminologies of Experts

These technological advancements can help us to know the voice of other stakeholders on the products. I have seen that we all different stakeholders holding different opinions on a product so if we express freely our opinions and if they are recorded sincerely we would have broad spectrum of understanding of our product. Moreover, designers for UX are running some guerilla research on the UX of the products at initial stages as well as during and after the accomplishment of the development process.

Amalgamation

If we sum up all, we would have enough insights to create innovative and unique products with excellent usability and user experiences. However, communicating with different components of web or mobile application designing is a daunting endeavor in itself. I explained Amanda that she has to have adequate knowledge of the terminologies the programmers use at one-hand and marketing teams at other hand.

In a common process, our marketing team will come at her with initial data collected from the clients regarding to their personal preferences, their business needs, culture of their businesses, trends running in the industry and so on. Afterwards, UX designers will run an initial survey as well as research team including SEO will collect the data on the target audiences and their requirements accordingly.

Therefore, understanding the terminologies of these entire battery of professional is essential and she should develop a capacity to implement their recommendations and give voice of them as well as clients and their target audience in her design is mandatory to make successful and acceptable product with good ROI.

Role of Designer

I also had warned Amanda about the nature and needs of the programmers because today we are living in responsive designing era where we have to beat the fragmentations on the hardware as well as software levels. For instance, we have to design for various screens ranging from large desktops to tiny smartphones. We have to consider the various operating systems for handheld devices such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc. We should have knowledge of designing techniques on all various platforms and have extensive libraries of UI components.

Thus, if we plan smart conversations with these all divers’ nature of components we will only be able to create usable products that are offering excellent user experiences offering maximum ROI for the clients.