Designing your design project

The approach you take to your design project can make or break it, how should you design your design projects?

Designing large UX projects is a tricky business, particularly when they involve complex requirements, multiple stakeholders, ambitious deliverables and tight timescales.

It’s the part of the design process that no one seems to talk about. Which is strange, as the approach we take can make or break our projects. How do we choose the right techniques? How do we decide the order in which to do things? How do we keep true to the ideals of user centred design within the constraints of a commercial environment? How should our approach flex to accommodate new requirements? How can we keep our ideas fresh in a world of ever-evolving technologies?

In this talk we will share our approach to this dark art. We will survey our peers within UX consultancies and client-side teams to gather and present a range of responses to designing UX projects. We will examine the similarities and differences between the contrasting approaches. We will investigate what makes a meaningful design project.

We all know that the project we design after an initial meeting is never the same as the one we actually deliver. In the second half of this talk we will explore some of the classic challenges that we face during our projects. When and how do we change our project's design? How do we balance conflicting user and business requirements? How do we deal with the politics? What if we're expected to work a UX miracle or two in a single day? We’ll explore the typical problems we face, the disasters we have overcome and also share some of our favourite tips and tricks when it comes to keeping things on track (and on time and budget).