- In larger organizations, development teams
are often either in different cities
or even different countries.
Communicating over distance and over time zones
can be really painful
especially if there's also a language or culture barrier.
With a design thinking approach,
you have a set of artifacts that can help other team members
who get involved as the project progresses
to easily understand the reasons
behind your design decisions.
The experience map, which shows
the existing customer journey, incorporates all the issues
and cultural sticking points that make it clear
why the problems exist in the first place.
The prototype shows the intended interaction
that will resolve those pain points.
Often, I have found that the biggest issue in outsourcing
comes at the interaction level.
The outsource team can interpret a specification document
but the interfaces they deliver
often look like a jumble of form fields
or the result from a SQL query.
By showing them the intent of the interaction
and the visualization of how it should progress,
it's much more likely
that they'll create an interaction flow
that meets your customer's needs.
Seeing videos of use a testing sessions
or even just a video walkthrough of the experience
from the paper prototypes can help even more.
Once team members see the product in action,
even in such an early form,
they're much better able to see how their contribution
fits into the whole process.
And the story map provides an overview
of the team's intentions,
both in this phase of development and in the future.
Walking a remote team through the map,
helps them understand the bigger picture
of the work they're involved in.
So they can see how that piece fits in
with everything else that's being worked on.
That way, it's more likely that the stuff they deliver
will integrate rather than looking and feeling
like a completely different product.
How much easier these artifacts to understand
than a document with lots of boring specifications
listed out and no real context?
The answer is much easier.
It's actually no real surprise that outsourced
and remote teams have difficulties delivering quality code
and interactions currently,
given the low bandwidth nature of the communication
we tend to have with them.
The design thinking artifacts help make sure
that everyone truly understands what the product goals are,
how it should look and behave,
and what's expected of them
at each stage of the release process.