Talk about the three modes of pairing design

A self-employed designer easy to take opportunistic as common sense, the ridicule party as a topic, the night to catch up with the map as a pride, "do not appreciate" as an excuse. And today the knot pair design not only can help you to correct these problems, but also improve the quality and efficiency of creative output and so on, this model is made by a foreign creative director, the effect is immediate, to collect!

Note: The first sentence is provided by @ Abin, thanks:

Translator Note: Knot pair design is not a new concept, pairing programming, development and testing, "men and women collocation, work not tired" concept has been in software companies and Internet enterprises. Last year at the Interaction14 conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Cooper's senior designer, Christopher Noessel, described in detail the benefits of closing the design in the workshop, and strongly advocated "get out of your own head! Design in pairs ". The writer, Mariya, a creative director of the San Francisco design and strategy Enterprise Xanadu, has recently prepared a book on design leadership and innovation management that concludes three common patterns of design and gives insights and guidance to the team that uses the knot pair design methodology.

Pair programming is an agile software development technology in which two developers work on the same computer, one of whom is responsible for writing code, and the facilitators check each line of code for omissions, and the roles of the two are rotated according to strategy and technical preference. Research has shown that when engineers spend 15% of extra time pairing to write software, they can reduce the number of defects by more than 15%.

Despite the differences between design and development, the advantages of pair programming can still be directly reflected in the pair design. The two-person design team focused on each other's details to avoid inattention to distraction. Each designer must explain the design decision in real time, and his partner will be responsible for continually validating the results, rather than reviewing the previous issues. Working closely with others also improves team morale, broadens the knowledge of the product, encourages ownership and helps the team to be harmonious.

Given the openness of the work, designers are often accustomed to working across cross-functional teams, typically by bringing together a group of people to brainstorm, design criticism or user research. However, some design leaders can make purposeful pairing designs in different ways, such as wireframe or front-end development, to solve problems that are usually handled by the designer in a traditional collective manner, simplifying collaboration, enhancing creativity, and improving the output design process.

　　Mode 1: The leader and the co-participants

Alan Cooper first put forward the concept of design in 1997, and introduced the role of the leader and the co-actor. The leader is responsible for maximizing as many ideas as possible, and the collaboration needs to analyze these ideas, initiate important issues, consider marginal conditions, and bind the solution to a more macro user or business context. Based on the personality traits and strengths and weaknesses of the candidate, Cooper has a conscious recruitment lead or synergy during the initial stages of the interview process. But in fact, designers often switch between the two types of roles, so that everyone has the opportunity to create more than enough ideas.

When the leader and the collaborators fully collaborate in the whole design process, the difference between the two in the early stage of the project is very obvious. For example, a pair of dominant & synergistic groups often use a pen to start communicating on the whiteboard, while the dominant person is writing and drawing to express various concepts, while the cooperating people are voicing concerns and optimization points. With a single pen, you can push focus and create more than a separate or competitive divergence.

　　Mode 2: Leaders and supporters

Adaptive path also allows designers to work on client-owned projects, but the two are not the roles of the leader and the Co, but rather are leaders and supporters. A designer is responsible for leading a client project and may only be responsible for supporting work in other projects. The advantage of this model is to encourage each designer to exercise their leadership and communication style, and broaden their professional soft skills in learning from each other.

The pattern of pairing between a leader and a supporter is the same as that of a junior designer paired with a senior designer, but any level of designer can benefit from a role switch. Jesse James Garrett, founder of Adaptive Path, firmly believes that "being a supporter can also grow and mature through practice." Many designers think that once they are not involved in the project's vision planning or taking on the role of a project leader, they will stagnate in their careers, but not at all. "In a client-specific project, Jesse is in charge of supporting his colleague Brandon Schauer, and has the opportunity to see how Brandon is developing a product vision workshop in a slightly confusing team." The problem with the team is that the foreign programmer can not smooth use of English communication and appear withdrawn and silent, the end result is that the meeting was dominated by some strong voice.

Through this experience, Brandon demonstrated an unusual ability to knead all the conversation, drive down the strong voice, encourage the silent speaker, steer the topic direction all the time and push the conversation to an end. In addition, he introduced structured exercises to constrain the scope of the discussion and to make it widely available--each participant used four instant stickers to write out three working methods and an ineffective way of working. "If I were a leader, maybe I would just use my own way." Brandon recognized the pros and cons of different tools and solved the problem in his own way, and gave me a lesson. ”

　　Mode 3: Cross-functional cross pair

Although the previous two patterns typically involve pairing of interaction designers or user experience designers, successful pairing can also be formed across functional teams in any design process. Cross-functional design usually occurs among different types of design experts, such as visual designers, interaction designers, user researchers, or information architects. However, pair design can also be a successful strategy for collaboration between designers and non-designers.

For example, when a company tries to understand a potential user, the product owner or executive stakeholder can work with the user researcher at the research stage. The user researcher directs the user to visit, asks the effective open question and encourages the user to tell the true story, on the other hand, the product person observes and makes the record. The advantage of this approach is that both roles observe the same behavior and are based on a consensus on the user and the domain. When important stakeholders are not deeply involved in the research phase, they are disconnected from the design decisions made by the designer based on the user's understanding because of lack of sufficient understanding.

Similarly, designers and developers are also benefiting from the design of the pair when facing high-precision prototypes or front-end code. When they are designing together with dynamic software rather than static prototypes, real time is not a technician, designers can also use a wealth of real-time interaction to express their views, developers can immediately point out the feasibility of each project and relative development costs, and constantly guide the formation of the design can be implemented to reduce the waste and communication costs.

Pair design does not apply to all innovative challenge projects, but it can greatly improve the creative output quality and design efficiency of the product team if reasonable use. The right delegating and collaborating people make it quicker and more effective to generate and evaluate ideas, which are more efficient than individual heroism, or allowing each designer to take turns in a messy group that is led by his own style and approach. The introduction of cross functional crossover pairs promotes empathy for other roles, allowing everyone to have access to different skills and creating a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the product.