George Kalmpourtzis - Don’t Force It, Solve It!: How To Design Meaningful and Efficient Design Processes

George Kalmpourtzis

First edition published 2022

by CRC Press

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ISBN: 978-0-367-50589-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-50565-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-05044-5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003050445

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by codeMantra

To my grandpa George

Writing a book is like embarking on a journey: you may know the destination (or at least you think that you do), but the path isnt always that clear. Some journey aspects may be rather straightforward, and some others may challenge your perspective, approach, and understanding of your professional, and broader, world. In order to embark on such long and exciting journeys, one needs the support of a team of brave and skilled heroes: working collaboratively, overcoming obstacles, and growing together. This section is dedicated to those who supported, impacted, and contributed to the creation of this book. Without the support and feedback of those heroes, this book would have never been written:

• George Ketsiakidis, Lazaros Vrysis, Margarida Romero, Fragkiskos Katsimpas, Christophoros Nalmpantis, Tilemachos Kalmpourtzis, David Jeanne, Remi Taieb, Ryan Gerber, Tobias Moller for their positive energy, feedback and for challenging my views and ways of thinking.
• Ifigeneia Tsolaki for her continuous and tremendous support in editing this book, encouragement, and colossal patience.
• Marcus OConnor for his fantastic proof-reading skills and his infinite positive energy.
• Sophia Spyrliadou whose majestic designs make this book both easier to read and a visual delight.
• Sean Connelly, Jessica Vega, and all the great team at CRC Press without whom this book would have never been published.
• Margarida Romero, whose work and support has been instrumental on my research journey.
• All the amazing teams, colleagues, and friends all around the globe whom I have worked with throughout the past years, who have helped me grow and approach design through a broader and more human perspective.

Thank you for all these amazing memories!

George Kalmpourtzis is an award-winning User Experience & Learning Experience Consultant and Game Designer. Finding himself between the fields of educational technology, design, and game studies, he has been founder, C-level stakeholder, director, and board member of several design studios, startups, and consulting agencies.

George has worked on a diverse portfolio of projects and contexts, spanning from highly complex dashboards to video games and from XR interfaces to mobile apps. He is currently helping L&D, design and product teams around the globe set up efficient and fun creative processes and bring user-centered creative problem solving in the heart of design. George also holds bachelors degrees in both education and engineering, a masters degree in information systems, and a PhD in design pedagogy. He has created, taught courses, and given lectures in academic institutions and corporations all over the world.

DOI: 10.1201/9781003050445-1

• Frustration abounds among the User Interface (UI) designers, User Experience (UX) designers, and user researchers of a large corporations design team. Even though they all want to contribute to creating great products, they consider that their voices are not being heard inside the organization. On top of that, the only things that seem to get created are obstacles, such as:
  1. Dependencies with other teams (developers, analysts, product managers)
  2. Deadlines that dont really take into account the time and complexity of the features theyre meant to deliver
  3. Mountains of change and feature requests that dont actually improve customers final experience

  As design is a complex process with lots of moving parts, the team feels their work and contribution are underrated. Some team members have the impression that the team only functions as a graphic assets jukebox for the organization. Others feel bored or frustrated, with the rest already searching for newer and funnier opportunities somewhere else.

• Theres a communication breakdown between the development and design teams of a startup. Developers are passionate about creating robust mobile apps, but they feel that designers arent approachable when they have questions about mockup designs and that proper documentation is often missing. To make things worse, as they rarely communicate with designers, developers arent thrilled about all the design changes being made to interfaces theyve already coded. They feel that designers switch up designs for no obvious reason and according to no particular logic. Designers, on the other hand, feel that updates to their designs are slow to be implemented or even never get done at all. Theyve got the impression that all developers ever do during meetings is slap unreasonable restrictions on their designs, which severely impacts their design output and the overall user experience.
• A large multinational corporation consists of dedicated development, design, user research, quality assurance, marketing, and product teams. Some of them are located around the globe making remote communication a key aspect of teams workflow. This causes major coordination issues as each dedicated team communicates very little about their work, goals, and progress. There are times that design and development teams work on tasks that are set by product management, without actually understanding how they fit into the broader picture of the organization and its products. The outcome is that team tasks often overlap and at other times design proposals and technical stack configurations dont match, rendering several months work obsolete. Everyone agrees that these errors could have been avoided if they didnt work in silos. However, the various teams are reluctant to take the initiative to improve communication as other teams may see that as an effort to take them over. Eventually, stakeholders are frustrated and all the teams blame each other for delays, rollbacks, or failed products.