UX and Architect are two sides of the design

The more I mature like a wine in a dark software development basement, the more I’m convinced that programming is not the most essential part of the development process, but the collaboration is.

Talking 💬
Discussing 🗣️
Exchanging thoughts 🤝
Confronting ideas ⚔️
Asking ❔
Drinking coffee ☕

Actually, drinking coffee is the first and vital thing. Try to take away a coffee machine for your devs. Two days at most, and they will painfully transform into life-sucking energy vampires!

As a Solutions Architect, I have to ask, and I have to know. Thus, I implement all questions, heuristics and collaborative tools to get reliable information about domain processes and activities.

I encourage customers to get their products to the market for verification as soon as possible. I ask about the potential future of the project’s life to assess the likely direction of its evolution.

I ask how the customer thinks it’s expected to measure the project's or functionality’s success to make sure the customer feels about real users’ needs.

I do my best to understand the customers’ domain and guide them through software development’s meanders as, in fact, it is another similar system I’m working on.

UX Designer, as the role name suggests, is also about design.

A few years back (Kyrie Eleison! How time goes fast!) I was astonished that the UXs I worked with for quite some time were using a bunch of heuristics written down on flashcards. That began the slow process of understanding how close we have to work together. I was “Balls! They ask the same questions!”.

The truth is that a UX designer must also understand the domain and the business reality. For the same purpose - design.

What does the UX do? Examples from the top of the shelf:

➡️ Designing users' feelings into usable flows and UI

➡️ Shifting the focus on the product's competitive advantage

➡️ Investigating the customer's competition to determine where to emphasise the UI and the activities.

All of that contributes to the potential project’s success.

Maturing in a barrel, I have understood that it is our job to contribute through collaboration and support.

Below, you can see today’s fruit of my collaboration with Natalia Milerska. _We squeezed the maximum knowledge into 3 hours of workshops_😃

A simple workshop board with a timeline and categorized sets of questions

I tried for the first time the Domain Storytelling (Stefan Höfer, Henning Schwentner). I liked it!