Human-Centered UX Design Includes Your Team
Conflict is inevitable. What matters is how you handle it. How’s your toolkit?
Our three-person, three-week project started out well: we put together a project plan and a conflict management strategy. We shared our personality types and our love languages*. We divvied up roles and responsibilities, and I volunteered as project manager. That didn’t mean anyone on the team reported to me, of course — just that I was in charge of setting up the Trello board, taking notes, and keeping us on track. We used Miro for virtual whiteboarding. We held daily standups. Our client was a dream, and the project engaging and interesting.
We were ahead of schedule, firing on all cylinders, and in great shape.
Until we weren’t.
It happens. This is the story of how we rode it out.
Wednesday
Our team had started wireframing, with one person taking lead (we’ll call her W). She had deep domain expertise in the vertical we were serving, which felt like a secret weapon. One catch was that she was a PC user while the test of the team was on Macs (RED FLAG), and preferred Adobe XD to Sketch (RED FLAG).
When it came time to hand off the wireframes to another team member (we’ll call him P) to develop a clickable prototype, he discovered they weren’t formatted consistently. The prototyper reached out to me as PM to share that the wireframes needed revision before he could even start on a prototype.
I knew how much work W had put in to design them initially, and offered to build a quick library and a few standard templates and snap all her work to a grid so we could move forward in a separate prototyping app. P countered with a suggestion to both update and prototype the wireframes in XD so that he and W could collaborate in real time.
I agreed that sounded like a great solution, as did W. She was scheduled to be out at a hackathon the next day, so I assumed (RED FLAG on me) that P would simply tidy up the wireframes, and that we’d all get together on Friday after our client meeting to create the prototype.
Thursday
Things inadvertently started to unravel in the wee hours of Thursday morning. P did more than a bit of tidying and snapping the wayward elements to a grid (a feature he’d discovered XD did not have).
He chose independently (RED FLAG) to move everything to another app that none of the three of us had used before (RED FLAG); which meant that he also needed to redesign every wireframe from scratch (I think we were pretty much out of flags by this point).
The redesign was well-intended, but understandably, W felt her work had been dismissed without being given a chance to iterate and improve it herself. Since she was out of the office, she took to Slack to express her dissatisfaction (flashing warning light). The thread became heated and personal on both sides; I pointed out, also on Slack (“wrong answer” buzzer sound, my bad), that the conversation had stopped being productive and asked that we table the discussion until we could all speak face-to-face.
The discussion petered out after that, but the damage had been done (siren wails becoming louder). By midday Thursday, W had expressed she wanted to leave the team, P was feeling misunderstood, and we all had a meeting with the client first thing the next morning.
After checking in with a mentor, I spoke with W and P separately and then together Thursday afternoon and brokered a deal: W would stay on the team and we’d present both sets of wireframes to the client in the morning.
Whichever design got 51% of the positive feedback, that designer would take it into prototype and across the finish line, with my support, in the week we had left. The other designer would work with me on a spinoff project, an app-side interface with the web tool we were building.
We’d be offering the client multiple options, both designers would get the opportunity to pitch their work, and our team would be providing an additional deliverable. Win-win-win! We missed our daily group standup (sad trombone), but the good news was the sirens were fading.
Friday
The sirens had almost disappeared until right before the client meeting Friday morning, when W opted out of presenting at all. She didn’t want to be in a design-off, she said. She’d just work on the spinoff project, she said. Everything was fine.
We got through the meeting, and I went back to the office, klaxons clanging in my ears. I barricaded myself in a phone booth and, not finding a superhero suit to change into, had a heart-to-heart with a mentor. “How do we salvage the final week on this project?,” I asked her.
And “How did you let this happen?,” I kept asking myself. “How did you not see this coming? How are you going to fix this?”
Later that morning, the team gathered to recalibrate in a conversation facilitated by my mentor and another trusted colleague. We did a mini-retrospective, noting what had gone well so far and what we could do better in the time we had left. I brought out our original project plan and conflict management plan for revision. Feelings that needed to be expressed were expressed; several rounds of apologies were made, including some from me, for my blind spots as PM.
The meeting didn’t end with hugs, but it did end with an updated set of operating agreements, a more granular set of tasks and assignments in Trello, and a commitment to twice-daily team standups (in addition to our end of day big group standup).
The Next Week
While my mentor had assured me that many teams come through conflicts like these even stronger on the other side, we didn’t experience any miracles.
We had, however, all committed to a strong finish for the project and our presentation, and together we delivered everything the client wanted, and more. We even got rave reviews specifically for our teamwork, which I think we were a bit too bruised to find much humor in at the time. The most important thing was the work, and we produced a top-notch project for our clients.
But it didn’t need to be that hard to get there.
What I Learned (Again…Because We All Know This Already)
- The important thing is the work, yes. The important thing is the user, no question. The really important thing to remember is teams are made of humans. And that means it’s likely that not everything will go exactly as planned.
- Assume good intent. Feelings were hurt across the board, but we all understood that nothing had been said or done with malice. That starting point helped take some of the sting out of what had already happened and helped lay the groundwork for a productive conversation.
- There’s no substitute for face-to-face connections. If you see (or are part of) a conversation going sideways on Slack or another online tool, go talk to that colleague in person, or at least pick up the phone. By letting that thread go on as PM, I allowed things to be said that couldn’t be unsaid; that’s on me as much as it is the team members who were engaging in the dispute.
- Boundaries are your friends. Not only do they document your scope and help keep colleagues on task, but they give the Tiggers on your team — and you’re bound to have at least one — something to run up against and test. You can always adjust a boundary based on new intel, but new boundaries are almost impossible to put in place once a project is underway. I could have been much more direct and specific while we were building our project plan as a team, and I won’t make that mistake again.
- Don’t leave details to chance or assume that everyone’s on the same page just because they’re nodding. Things as simple as what apps you’ll be using, or even whether you’re a Mac or PC team, need to be spelled out, no matter how like-minded a group you may be. Tools like Trello let you assign specific tasks to specific people, set deadlines, and send task reminders. Use those tools. Actively. Whether you are a PM or not.
- Ask for help. I facilitate team-building workshops and have a ton of training in conflict and dispute resolution, but that doesn’t mean I’m always the best person for that job — in this case, I had no authority over any other person or the group, and I wasn’t an entirely uninvolved party, either. Be self-aware enough to know when to stop and call for backup.
Yes, we all know all this already — it’s Management 101. But reminders are important, even if you have decades of experience, because cross-functional, self-organizing teams have their own dynamics. And life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right.
And life has a funny way of helping you out when you think everything’s gone wrong and everything blows up in your face.
In the end, it will all be okay if we can remember to take care of our own people as well as we take care of our users and our clients.
And so: we iterate.
*I’m an INTJ fueled by Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service, which will surprise exactly no one who’s met me.
I’m Houli, a UX researcher and designer based in Austin, Texas. Follow my adventures here or on Twitter at @thejhoulihan.
