More importantly, they’re not bogged down with the administrative work around simply tracking down design feedback or clarifying change requests on designs. With collaborative design, feedback is centralized and gathered directly on the design file itself, enabling your designers to focus on the creative aspects of the project. By injecting creatives into the right stage of the design process and asking them for ideas and feedback, you can give them a sense of ownership around the finished product.

As a result, I was able to streamline controls and make sure there was a solid understanding of how things functioned from our team before asking external people who had no understanding of the product for their feedback. Collaborating with the stakeholders might be time consuming initially, but this can significantly improve the overall design of the software products.

A prototype can be almost anything—a piece of paper, an interactive invision board, a card sorting sitemap, or a fully-coded interactive experience that can be used to test how a typical user engages with a design.feedback  When I’m uncertain about an assumption I have about a design, it helps to do some informal user testing both with our agency’s entire team—both designers and non-designers. This testing with members of your team is a really helpful exercise for thinking through basic user experience patterns because everyone brings a unique understanding of web accessibility standards and how to improve usability.

Larger projects demand even more collaboration between designers. Some of our recent team projects have been re-launching our own site and designing the communication network’sjournal change agent. These projects have allowed us to put our egos aside and engage in meaningful conversations about what’s best for the overall project. It has been challenging to give constructive criticism on a colleague’s work, but when something is bothering one person, it’s usually bothering more too. Giving each other feedback forces us to have tough conversations about what we’re trying to convey with our designs and understand if something isn’t as inclusive or accessible as it could be.

This is where the designers can pursue collaborative design to overcome differences across teams. However, using a collaborative design process also instills something deeper within a team. It gives everybody a chance to get involved and feel a sense of ownership with every product they work on. And that's important not only for your quality work, but also the overall bond within your team. From a productivity perspective, collaborative design allows your team to work together and fastens up the feedback and testing process. The early research phase ensures everybody is on the same page, while the later stages of the process means each person working on a design can give feedback before it's handed over to your client.

This, in turn, increases the entire team’s feelings of ownership in the work. Finally, collaborative design builds team-wide shared understanding. It is this shared understanding that is the currency of lean ux. The more the team collectively understands, the less it has to document in order to move forward. Coordinating among all of these separate disciplines can be hard because each of these has different goals and priorities. A designer argues that it must be usable, a business stakeholder contends that it should be viable, and a technology analyst is concerned with the feasibility of the product.

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