A design team is a team of many masters. More colloquially, pretty much everyone has a dog in the fight.
How it looks, what it says, does it make money, is it legal, will it meet the schedule, how hard will it be to build – these are all things that team members will be looking out for.
Research is one of the few areas that really sees the project holistically. That said, research does, however, tend to focus on a single person. That person is pretty important though – the user.
Now, it is important to understand where your different team members are coming from. Your company is in business to make money. They also want to make money now rather than later. They’re also very interested in not losing money, especially by getting sued or fined. And whatever everybody else comes up with, somebody's going to actually have to build the darn thing.
When it comes down to it, though, somebody really needs to be there to stand up for the user. And, guess what? That’s you!
No one else is going to do it as well as you. Nobody else is going to spend as much time with these folks. Nobody’s going to get to know them as well. Nobody else is going to care about them as much as you do.
So, don’t worry too much about all the other stuff. They have their advocates, and their place at the table. Your job is to make sure that the user doesn’t get lost in the cracks. It happens!
What the team doesn’t often realize is that making the user happy can help them reach their own goals. And, conversely, substituting their own goals for user goals can often blow up in their faces. Which reminds me of another great quote:
"If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy."
Brenda is known mostly as a video game designer, but actually was one of the early pioneers in UX
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