Empathy Driven Development
Empathy Driven Development
When it comes down to it, you can’t create great products without empathy. Empathy must be at the heart of everything you do. Design aligns the vision with the company identity using brand consistancy. User Experience ensures the product behaves within the users’ expectations. Development putting all the pieces together, using all the ingredients, honoring the spirit of the product with a watchful eye toward usability.
A lot of design and UX isn’t fully realized until the software developers pull everything together and view it on a mobile device or in a web browser. The developer is the first person to see how things are working together and this is often a huge missed opportunity as a dev team is encouraged to deliver those tickets.
I talk a lot about our vigorously collaborative team — collaboration and empathy are at the core of our identify and we execute with thoughtful purpose. When Steve, John, and I started Eight Bit Studios, we came from a design agency full of A-level talent, most of whom were at the top of their game. Across project management, design, user experience, development, we had teams of amazingly talented and hard working folks.
As happens at a lot of agencies, these teams were handicapped by their functional silos: Design would hand off to UX would hand off to the technical team. These hand-offs were stage-gated which lead to software development being an afterthought which would have been fine if we were building brochure-ware. Instead, we were building very robust systems for high-profile clients: Oprah Winfrey, Butterball, HON, Burger King, and Craftsman to namedrop a little.
Steve, John, and I craved to challenge what we found to be the agency status quo: A design first agency will sideline execution and put deliveries at risk. A dev-shop will turn out low-caliber, ad-hoc, inconsistent product design. We sought to create an environment where team boundaries would be questioned in order to put the work, the quality, and our clients’ interests front and center.
A great example of our devotion to collaboration and empathetic development is some very excellent work done on EchoDrive.
A screen called “Find Loads” handed to our iOS team by our design team included a call-to-action: the user selects the type of equipment necessary to fulfill this load. This equipment selection will refine the requirements necessary to fulfill this pickup and narrow out which drivers will be capable of executing the pickup.
Tapping the button takes the user to a new screen, called “Select Equipment,” where they could choose the equipment. The “Select Equipment” screen is well organized and allows the user to clearly see the selected item with a helpful green-check icon. Selecting a new item on this screen would automatically navigate the user back to the “Find Loads” screen. All in all, very well designed, consistent in its presentation, the application communicates effectively with the user. The intentions are clear. This is solid UX meets well thought-out design.
We made both the iOS and Android version of the EchoDrive mobile application. At this time, the iOS developer leading the project had an idea to introduce a new navigation design element to the user’s experience. This new navigation would somewhat break with the established design-patterns but would leverage known visual cues so as to bring a smooth and congruent animated transition into play. The developer ran this by the product designer on EchoDrive, asking if she minded if he took a crack at making this a bit tighter; more smooth. She, of course, said, “have at it.”
I love this Eight Bit moment both for the innovative design as well as the story behind it. We encourage our team to look for key moments of interactive delight and to identify with the end user. We look for ways to push each other’s boundaries, when timelines and budgets allow. And when a team comes together and delivers out of their swim-lane, knocking it out of the park, it’s a win for the team, for our client, and for the users.
Thanks to Andrew Webb