Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

of those is that the best ideas spring forth out of people’s brains solely through the magical
workings of some special creativity neurons. Creativity tends to be thought of as a solo
pursuit. But I’ve come to appreciate how much creativity can come out of collaboration,
and how you never know where and from whom good ideas will come. The poet John
Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island / Entire of itself / Every man is a piece of the
continent / A part of the main.” 1 The same must be said for the UX designer.
It’s important to see UX not as just the UX designer’s work, but as a collaborative
process. Not only are users essential partners, but so are the rest of the product team and
the stakeholders, and understanding how to be an open-minded, collaborative member of
the product team is essential. This makes the process of incorporating UX into projects
work smoothly, but the input of team members can lead you to some great new ideas and
save you from pitfalls.
I had a fantastic experience recently collaborating on a feature of the new finance app
for Yahoo. The company had brought in an absolutely brilliant student, Jonathan Willing,
as an intern. He’s a real bad-ass tech whiz, and they had him working on front-end
development. We implemented an animation technology he developed that makes use of
what’s called spring physics, which allows you to design iOS animations with a whole set
of highly refined parameters for properties such as momentum, dampening, and
acceleration. (He’s made the code open source, and it’s available at
https://github.com/jwilling/JNWSpringAnimation.)
The resulting animations are truly visually striking, and I worked with Jon to animate
a loading indicator for the app, which, in my humble opinion, looks great and has been
very well received. I would never have been able to ask my full-time front-end people to
do something like that for our first version of the app, because it was viewed as a flourish
that wasn’t core to the app, and I would never have known about the technology if I
weren’t keeping my ears open and willing to learn from Jon.
The development of digital products is one of the most dynamic and creative
endeavors of our time, and it attracts incredibly talented people who come to it from all
sorts of educational backgrounds and prior work experience. I’ve been able to collaborate
with designers who work exclusively in the motion graphics tool After Effects, making
sure every element they put on the screen has life and personality. They’ve taught me a
great deal about just how dynamic graphics can be. A web developer I worked with at the
Wall Street Journal ran a game development studio on the side that pushed the limits of
the hardware a web browser can access on a smartphone. He taught me how to harness the
accelerometer to make an app’s display shift perspective with the user’s movements. You
absolutely want to tap into the experience of your coworkers. And hey, you never know
who’s going to be the next Loren Brichter or Amanda Cox who might bring you along in a
breakout new avenue, or with what brilliant colleague you may be able to create your own
experience.