Working with other principles
The biggest win for a Lead Service and Interaction designer is to create bridges to all the other disciplines. This is easier said than done, and in my experience people need to gain something in return for their time, reciprocity.
People will come to your meetings, crits, workshops and pair programming if they feel they will gain knowledge. So, that’s what I did. I provided my knowledge, set expectations and created reciprocal relationships, with other Leads, Senior practitioners and everyone else.
BA’s
For Service and Interaction designers to make informed design decisions, they need the right information. But, sometimes that’s not enough. Having the right information provided in the right way is what Service and Interaction designers need. For that reason, working in collaboration with the Lead BA at the HMRC to create the ‘Model’.
A ‘Model’ screenshot from the HMRC
This provides Interaction designers all the conditional logic they might need to create a realistic prototype and consider all the possible dependencies a service might have, both external and internal and taking into account any unknown factors.
At the same time it creates a Strategic asset to be used, expanded and adopted by the Business Analysis folks, to increase consistency within large UCD teams.
UR’s
User research is extremely valuable to UCD teams to enable designing with data and building services that make policy meet the user needs and expectations. For that matter, I worked very closely to the Lead User research folks in the Department for Education to create a new more inclusive approach to Usability testing, using a method from the NNGroup called ‘Thinking Aloud’ test.
This project went so well that it became instantly adopted to the large UR community (They outnumbered us in the DfE by a factor of 10), that I created a presentation for this and presented it to ‘Services Week’ Manchester 2019.
Services Week presentation 2019
DEVs
The best relationship an interaction designer can build is with their Front End dev. He/She/They can be the one person that can actually make an interaction designers prototype work when it is broken. Similarly the same goes for the Seniors and Leads of these two principles. There’s a lot that we can teach each other and a lot of benefits for the whole.
This was achieved in its best form in my time at the HMRC, building on experience as a Senior Service and Interaction designer moving from the DfE I worked very closely with the Front End Lead in Newcastle to create pair-programming sessions, these were not only used to solve immediate code issues but also teach ‘how to’ write good commit messages and code comments.
Live Share extension in VS code
Everyone else
By building the tools and the space that allow everyone to contribute in participatory design, allows people to feel the need to come to your meetings, crits and everything else. For that matter, building on the wonderful Design Histories created by Paul Hayes.
I created a CMS version of the Design Histories to allow non technical UCD practitioners to write design histories and participate, Service Designers, Content Designers, Delivery Managers and everyone else!
CMS home
CMS editor
In Conclusion
Collaboration is about giving, give and you shall receive. The more you help others the more help comes your way, as a Leader you have to lead by example, you have to do the hard work, create the tools and the processes so other do not have to. They can change, adjust and improve on your concepts. But, you must always, always teach what you know.