Photo of printed version of UX Playbooks
I’ve created numerous UX Playbooks to help User Experience teams socialize and solidify their contributions within their organization. Often times, UX is a newly created discipline within a company or the team is experiencing fast growth and call on a UX Playbook to help them along the growth journey.
Some of the benefits of a UX Playbook are:
Co-workers know what to expect from the UX team
In a UX Playbook, the team defines their design process, shows examples of their best work, and works out the kinks of roles within UX and previous roles that had been taken care of by Product Managers, Business Analysts, Software Developers and Project Managers.
Project Managers know how to estimate our time better
Often Project Managers want clearer guidance as to how to incorporate a UX resource into an upcoming project. They want to know how much involvement the UX needs to have on the project and when. They need to know how much time to allow the UX design or researcher to complete their work.
A UX Playbook is a chance for the UX Team to define themselves and the relationship they have with PMs.
Software Developers will know how to partner with UX
Software Developers love knowing what they will be provided with. They want to know ahead of time (before doing their System & Architectural Designs) what the UX team will deliver and if there will likely be design decisions they will have to fill in. They want to know if images will come sliced (some want this, some do not). Will designs be tested on users first? (they hope so).
Developers want to code just once. With a UX Playbook (and style guide), we get closer to this.
The purpose of a UX Playbook is to showcase the capabilities and process of the User Experience (UX) Team. UX design processes are highly collaborative and can be well integrated into any SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) methodology. The Playbook serves as a guide and catalog to benefit project teams and all those that work alongside UX.