Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

Joseph Selbie studied design teams and found a correlation between successful web applications and holistic understanding across team members.

The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment—a holistic view—the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was “siloed” into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.

The author describes 5 key ways to achieve holistic understanding:

1. All team members conduct at least some user research
2. Team members participate in work and task flow workshops
3. Team members share and discuss information as a team
4. Team members prioritize information as a team
5. Team members design together as a collaborative workshops

I disagree with the last one and would amend it to say Team members review and provide feedback on designs together as a team.

Selbie's company also created a Feature and Activity Matrix for prioritization, which ranks features across technical feasibility, business goals and user need.