Development is always going to be challenging field, but there’s plenty of room to remove the unnecessarily complex and frustrating parts of building software
We recently mapped out what the typical deployment flow looks like for a specific environment. We knew development was hard, but we were surprised to learn just how deep the “gotchas” can get. It seems rare that development tools will proactively tell you system status and requirements for a process to be complete.
In the absence of this, one error at a time seems to be uncovered, where layer after layer of a frustration onion are exposed 🧅🤢
(This must be why (╯°□°）╯︵ is seen around the world in dev forums)
Our perspective as newbies and user/simplicity oriented people was very much appreciated and we were able to add a lot of value. Our layperson questions were serving to expose the status quo of expectations in the developers workflow. After having this experience, we recognized that there’s a great potential here to improve DevEx in many places.
We work on a variety of DevEX focused tools in different aspects of the workflow
Enabling deep work and focus for developers is a key part of our mission to propel knowledge workers across disciplines. We kinda just love devs—we work really closely with them on all of our projects. This collaboration is one of the foundations to building design solutions that work well and make sense. Design wouldn't be possible without developers and without the vital input and cross-communication that comes with it. That's why we love any opportunity to improve the day-to-day work lives of developers! We see huge potential for UX improvement across these tools and are excited for the kind of impact we can make together.
Applying the right design principles to your demo can create excitement and engage your audiences more effectively. We put together this whitepaper to help you inject some UX love into your product—we cover common mistakes, what a makes a demo successful, and more!
Your development product needs to work with the right UX team, we get it. Here’s some FAQ’s we’ve seen before.
We act as a plug and play design team for a range of situations. From teams who have never integrated any kind of UX design resource, to supplementing and collaborating with existing design teams. Depending on your needs, we can take the lead on new ideas, or support the team you have in place. We shine when it comes to collaboration and integrating quickly in teams. See our article about product management and design collaboration for example
We do the full scope of UX/UI design for software in the enterprise arena. This includes “zooming out” and formulating logic around the whole flow, to wireframing (mapping out screens) and producing realistic prototypes. UX/UI design however does not extend to branding or marketing, so we will happily refer you to wonderful teams we know.
Our team gets brought into projects across the spectrum of stages. Sometimes we’ll work with a single visionary to establish direction and then grow with the team. Other times, development will be underway and there’s a more urgent context to the work. Ideally we’re brought in earlier rather than later.
We’ve had great success making relatively small UX improvements to software which have significantly improved the usability and flow of products (and it doesn’t always need to be fancy UI or animations either). We believe that incremental improvement to your product and development process can make a huge difference. Often this is accompanied with longer-term work that sets a vision for the future. Both of these approaches work hand in hand to improve your product.
Your business case and ROI calculation around UX investment may come down to several different factors that relate to the specifics of your business. A very common situation we see is the development team spending a lot of time trying to make design decisions, this cost savings might be a useful initial lens to apply. If you’re in a particularly competitive field, where your enterprise product is starting to lag behind in a scary way, you may want to apply the lens of opportunity cost. Many of our clients have used design concept work to de-risk development efforts and secure interest for large opportunities. Regardless of the approach you have, please leverage our resource “How to calculate the ROI of UX” as a guide and inspiration for you and your team.
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