Why You Need a UX Team (Part 2)

In Part 2 of this series on “Why You Need a UX Team“, we emphasize the importance of using resources for their strengths and not their weaknesses.

Let Designers, Design and Developers, Develop.

The truth is, everyone on your team should be focused on the User Experience but it’s important that you use people for their strengths and not their stretch them into something they are not. I often say “You don’t want me designing a data model or writing your SQL queries – so why would you want a developer to design your UX?”. It’s easy to understand how many clients fall into the trap of believing they will save money if they can hire one developer to perform many jobs — especially if they are bootstrapping a startup or new business idea. The reality is, not hiring a UX Team will almost certainly cost you money because you will likely end up with an inferior product that doesn’t live up to your Return on Investment (ROI) expectations.

In addition, hiring a UX Team will likely improve the overall velocity of your Agile Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) because development will require a lot less iterations, which is typically where a lot of effort hours are burned. If the UX Team does their job, they should produce a software prototype that clearly spells out the functional requirements and removes a lot of the unknowns that a development team will typically run into as they code.