Integration of User Experience into Software Development

Creating an optimal user experience is how your customers enjoy your software product. You might be curious about the role of user experience (UX) professionals in software development. Do their tasks end with the completion of the design process? Or, do their job duties leak into other parts of the software development process?

Here, we'll explore the user experience (UX) team's role and how it can substantially impact your business's software development project.

The Design Process for UX Professionals

The UX team's most transparent role is to take on the design portion of the software development process.

This process breaks down into three phases:

• The Discovery Phase: A UX team will define a product's goals through user modeling, user research, task analysis, and requirements documents.

• Design: In this phase, a UX team will create the user interface (UI) for a product. It will implement ideation, conceptual modeling, specification, and detailed design.

• Development Support: The UX team will refine the design repeatedly and make adjustments throughout the development cycle.

From an outsider's perspective, UX professionals handle the design portion of your company's software. But, this task is just scratching the surface of their duties. They serve as the bridge between product management and software development, meaning they encompass the entire product's team versatility and creativity.

Ensuring a Company Executes Your Software Product Design

Too often, a company will scratch a software product before it reaches the end-user. You'll need to be available if issues arise or the project's scope changes during development to ensure your product design makes it on the market.

Software development is never stagnant — it has many moving parts. Because the process is never stationary, you should anticipate a never-ending cycle of updates.

This evergreen state of change is never an indicator of failure — instead, it's an opportunity for you to make improvements. When developers discover error conditions, you need to be ready to provide error messages and offer your support to remediate them.

Whatever you recommend, keep your specifications up to date so that they reflect your entire product team's understanding of the software project.

A UX Professional's Many Roles During Software Development

Ideally, a company should view UX professionals as indispensable team members throughout the entire product development phase and beyond. Some notable phases a UX professional should be present for include:

• Foundational user research

• Concept development

• Prototyping

• Interface design

• Repetitive (iterative) design

• Usability testing

• User experience evaluation (you can evaluate customer feedback at this point)

Integrating UX isn't a one-and-done process. Keeping a UX designer around for all these phases will help ensure that the end product matches the intended design.

The Blurring of Design & Development

In theory, the two concepts seem distinct. However, in real-life applications, the lines between these two phases become blurred for a UX professional.

An excellent UX designer usually has some software engineering background. With this knowledge and expertise in tow, they can better understand the importance a developer has in their product design.

The development and UX team working together will encourage significant progress. When a UX designer makes even minor changes, the product's implementation can go more smoothly.

For example, a UX designer can reuse components to speed up the development process. This seemingly minor change will liberate software engineering labor, allowing the engineers to solve more arduous portions of the project.

Why a UX Designer Should Never Leave a Project Prematurely

If you abandon your project prematurely, you'll leave the product's development team to fend for itself. They'll carry out the product's interaction design based on your deliverables. No matter how concise your deliverables are and how much time you spend making them, they won't reflect your vision fully.

If the development team gets stuck on how to proceed, they'll interpret your deliverables in the best way they can. Their interpretation will likely result in a final product that's much different from the one you initially envisioned.

A UX designer should stay committed to a project until the very end. Your work isn't even done when the software product hits the market. To fulfill your product's potential, you must learn customers' responses and act on the feedback you receive.

Leaving a project before seeing it through is not ideal. In this situation, everyone (and everything loses): your software's potential, the company you're working for, and the clients you release the product to.

Different Ways a Company Can Hire a UX Professional

It's never ideal for a UX designer to hand over a product design after the design phase. Unfortunately, this process often occurs in large companies with poor organization.

When a company hires a UX designer properly, they can provide an excellent user interface and ensure the product survives the development process. You can work as a UX designer for three different types of companies:

1) Outsourced Developer

The full-cycle design and development process gets handled by other companies. An outsourced developer can bring a lot of experience to the table and assist with large-scale projects.

2) UX Consultancy

A UX consultancy only gets involved with the UI phases on small, medium, and large-sized projects.

3) Product Company

A product company develops niche products and works to develop their different versions continuously.

A UX designer will have unique involvement with each of these companies. However, they'll get a desirable final product if they stick with the project from start to finish.

How Can UX Professionals Make a Bigger Impact?

A successful UX designer understands that they aren't a one-man show. Learning about other people's roles and how to aid them more efficiently will help you thrive in the long run.

As you're looking to make a big impact, you should keep the following tips in mind:

• Be specific: As you create a user experience design blueprint, make sure your UX specifications are clear yet concise. You should provide your developers with just enough information so that they understand your product vision. You never want to confuse or overwhelm them. They aren't mind-readers, so articulating your ideas is essential. You should also focus on delivering your blueprints efficiently — before the coding and technical architecture planning process is ideal.

• Sympathize with your developers: You and the development team are working toward a common goal — to deliver the most functional, useful product possible. You'll each endure unique struggles that neither of you will understand fully. Remain sympathetic throughout the process. Communicate using terms they'll understand, show sympathy for problems they're having, and be willing to compromise when necessary.

• Stay creative: No project will be without flaws. When you encounter setbacks, work twice as hard to find brilliant, win-win solutions for your developers and end-users.

When you approach any software development project, you should be aware of basic details like the deadline and the product's goals. You should also look ahead and determine how much leeway you have to influence the project's results. Understanding your position will help you perform the best job possible.

UX & Agile Software Development

Agile software development is the process of using self-organized, multi-functional teams to enhance product solutions.

Agile UX will help facilitate constant changes for your software development project and encourage collaboration across your company. As a result, you'll have a more effective product that your users will love and enjoy for the long term.

Through the agile UX process, a company can create different scenarios and mockups to determine the real-life application for the software. This process works out issues prematurely and creates long-lasting solutions.

Contact Us Today

Does your company need a software product but doesn't have the in-house resources to create one? If so, contact our team at SOPHiLABS today. We will help you develop software with a focus on agile UX. We'll stay with you throughout the software development process to optimize the final product.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about how we can help your software development project.