All UX designers have a working process, no matter how simple or complex. When functioning as intended, everything is good and well: the process and tools themselves become secondary, pushed underneath an ocean of on-time deliverables, brilliant ideas, and deadlines met.
However, when the UX design process breaks or its tools don’t function as needed, it can bring a project schedule to its knees.
Because the working process is vitally important to our industry, every UX designer worth their salt is constantly reevaluating their design process to be better and more efficient: Polishing this bit, replacing Exercise A with Exercise B, tweaking this, that, or the other. The tools of the UX industry move fast and are plentiful.
It should come as no surprise then when you approach a UX designer and ask what new software or feature they would invent to make their working process better that you get hit over the head with great ideas.
Members of the Slide UX team were asked this very question, and we’re here to share our ideas. Software developers take note…
Customizable Project Management Dreams
Our Co-Founder, Erin Young, describes her dream all-in-one project planning solution saying, “For me, the holy grail would be a single project management tool that does everything the way we need it done - lead tracking, project estimation, approval, project planning, resourcing, hours-tracking, burn reports, task tracking, and invoice tracking. Over time, we have evolved very specific ways of doing each thing we do, but none of the all-in-one tools that we've explored have done all the things the way we need. If I had spare time - like a year or three - I would love to design a homegrown, all-in-one solution that allowed our team to worry less about which system to use and more about the work.”
A spare year or two for anything would be fantastic.
Workflow Automation Wishes
Automating workflows was also a hot topic, mentioned by Sliders as being potentially valuable to their future design processes.
Slide’s own Brant Young shared two automation concepts with the team. Brant describes what he calls a “Best in Breed Asset Management System with Smart Recommendations” saying, “It's often hard to recall examples you've seen while browsing or to know the best search query to find specific examples. This tool would allow you to save URLs, page-level components, or screen captures to a system with very intelligent tagging and search functionality. Over time it would start to recommend examples that are similar to what you have saved in the system.”
He also goes into detail on a second product he would love, a “Web-based Interactive QA Tool.” Brant writes, “This could work in both dev and production environments. Designers could run this application while reviewing dev implementation to check style/functionality specifics. When there are areas that don't match with design specs or need simple adjustments, the designer could modify the code in a preview mode that would then allow them to submit the change for developer review. This would start a workflow process with various ways to manage the request. For example, accept and push live, deny, add to queue, modify and re-submit to designer, etc.”
Seeking Superior Software
Another topic hit on by our Slide team was improved organizational systems.
Senior Consultant, Lindsay Winters, talks about a computer OS-level dashboard, “I would like a dashboard that compiles all the apps I use. I’d be able to see my latest Sketch files, tasks due in the upcoming week, email, and favorite Slack channels. I’d be able to manage all of them from the dashboard except Sketch; clicking on a file would take me into Sketch directly. It’d be so much better than jumping between tabs and sometimes, from screen to screen.”
Travis Slate, also a Senior Consultant, mentions how he would smooth over one client feedback pain point. “I want a better system for clients to provide feedback to designers. It often seems like cloud documents aren't a viable solution for larger companies, and sifting through PDF comments (often over multiple files) is less than ideal. I've seen various tools online that claim to solve this issue, but none seem to hit a home run, in my opinion.”
Another Senior Consultant, Megan Baker, also desires a more organized work process. She writes, “I would like a single place where best practices and research findings live so that when we need to either heuristically review or design a search results page, for example, we can go there to remind ourselves of what we may already know from past projects or learn what someone else on the team has learned who has designed something similar. It could also include best-in-breed examples to pull from, and even links to our own related past work.”
While the majority waxes poetic on software systems, Principal Consultant, Chad Currie, takes things in a different direction altogether. Dropping a little hardware love into the digitally dominated discussion, he says, “Here's something I want that's actually hardware and software – I want a big mute button on my (physical) desktop that mutes my microphone system-wide so I don't have to hunt for it in each app. When it's muted, it glows red, so there's no questioning the state of things.”
After experiencing accidentally muted speakers, loud typing, barking dogs, coughing, and muffled backroom conversations during countless conference calls, that’s something a lot of us could really get behind.
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