Here at the We Love Manor you won’t hear battles raging or sabres rattling over ‘who is more important, the designer, or the developer, or the UX’ kind of argument that so frequently pops up on the web. While others may be fixated on ring-fencing tasks and generally treading on each other’s toes, we love to love…
Quite frankly, I like people having clear roles. Should a designer think about user experience? Of course! It’s good to consider different disciplines and how they will steer a concept. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t need a UX on board. Specialists are experts, meaning they are experienced in their field – they’ve been round the track before, they made the mistakes and learned – they are focused.
Projects always lend themselves to cooking analogies, so here goes: Not all meals are the same. Often it’s an issue of scale. Cooking a quick meal for the family, you can probably manage it by yourself and do a pretty good job (even all the PM stuff about buying ingredients and washing up). Same for a small project. One person may well be able to manage the PM, user experience, design, development and support all by themselves – and having a range of skills is a real bonus. As for Pot Noodle, even James can do that by himself.
But what if you run a cafe? You have several deliveries all running concurrently, there are too many tasks to be executed by one person. So you get in a team of talented peeps and you diversify – someone runs the kitchen, someone serves the food, someone else may run the shop and keep everything on track. Each member of this team is specialising, but the food is simple, the service is informal and they could probably swap roles easily if needed. This is like a medium scale project – the workload requires more hands on deck and you’ll get the most efficiency from a team who take care of a specific area, but are able to diversify. So again, you might get a lot of crossover between skills.
Now imagine a big project. Think of it like a quality restaurant – lots of meals being served at the same time, each a highly-crafted piece of culinary expertise, delivered in context by experts in their field: sommeliers, chefs, waiting staff, front-of-house, kitchen porters. Specialists, coming together around a bigger picture, focusing on their skills to make the product exceptional.
That’s how we roll. We know the value of diversification, each team and team member gets respect for their unique part of the solution, and cooperates on every stage of the planning and execution. Yet each has a broad range of cross-discipline knowledge, giving us a deep understanding of each other’s roles and faith in their skills.
So while some seem intent on inventing a dichotomy, living in a Waterfall-world where each project phase is executed, passed on, and ignored or over-ruled by the next team, we prefer to grow our solutions according to our combined knowledge. And to target our approach proportionately: Need to encourage conversions? – Ask the IA, she’ll know how; Want beautifully effective prose? – Our copywriter has got it covered; Print, web, or product design? – We have real designers to take care of that, and for HTML and everything beyond, the development team are right there with the best solution from day one.
So why fight? Let’s get together and cook up some love.
