As a senior UX designer at Tidal Cyber, I often field questions from other designers and cybersecurity industry colleagues on how to work effectively in a lean team environment. Lean teams typically operate with a ratio of one designer for every 10 to 20 developers. So, it requires a lot of multi-tasking, context-switching, and cross-team collaboration that can be challenging to navigate.
The following are some best practices I’ve learned and want to share to help others thrive in these dynamic environments and deliver innovative solutions that balance form, function, and impact:
Have a Roadmap
Prioritization helps ensure that the usage of a product – every input, form, page, feature, and workflow – creates the desired user experience. Having a roadmap and strong product leadership backed by executive sponsorship helps guide where your focus should be. A roadmap provides much needed structure around product decisions, and a disciplined process to advocate for UX issues. When there’s a challenge with meeting a deadline, an unanticipated wrinkle solving a problem, or a case for adding a new feature or function on the fly, there’s a way to raise and address it quickly.
Communicate with Developers
Some designers get pigeonholed or hyper-focused on UX, but there’s the other side of it – building functionality. As a designer, you don’t need to learn how to code, but you do need to know the framework your developers are using so they feel comfortable talking to you. Communication also benefits you, as it helps developers to understand the design side of the equation. The only way to know if you’re all on the same page is by having an open line of communication and actively listening.
Collaborate on Problem Solving
UX designers have a lot to keep up with as your work impacts multiple different aspects of the final product and multiple teams. However, silos between teams can make it hard to remember that you are all working on the same thing. It requires a team effort to deliver a product. And when something isn’t working as intended, it often requires a team effort to fix. Eliminating the silos and empowering teams to collaborate on problem solving will help make sure what you’re designing can be built and delivered. Collaboration also fosters transparency, so issues can be addressed quickly.
Use Tools to Help
A picture is worth a thousand words. In addition to collaboration and project management tools like Confluence and Jira, UX design tools, such as Figma, make it easy to share the various stages of designs with the rest of the team. White boarding features allow you to invite teammates to workshop an idea, go through a workflow, and even drill down into design details.
Time management is particularly challenging when you’re required to work on multiple different products or product features simultaneously and collaborate with different teams. Be diligent about your schedule. It’s great to be included and informed, but it may not be practical to be in every meeting. Balance meetings with work by learning which meetings are important for you to be in and when watching the recording or reading the notes will suffice.
Tune-in to Customers
As a UX designer, one of the best things we can do is make products more accessible for a variety of users:
- People with different levels of technical expertise (from IT teams to non-technical employees).
- Neurodiverse users (who may struggle with complex workflows or poor error messaging).
- Users with disabilities (who need accessible security features).
- People under stress (because security decisions are often made in high-pressure situations).
In a lean environment, you might think this is “nice to have, when we have time.” However, in cybersecurity, accessibility is crucial to your customers’ ability to mitigate risk.
At Tidal Cyber our customer experience team is a huge support. They gather feature requests and input on usage and include UX design on this feedback. As a result, we continue to update our workflows with more context and guidance and refine the backend to support additional functionality.
A specific example that comes to mind is a request by a customer with several security team members impacted by color blindness. The Tidal Cyber platform is a data visual-heavy tool, and we were able to quickly refine color palettes and introduce a pattern view to reinforce differences on the page. Users have a variety of settings to accommodate for any kind of visual impairment they might have.
Get Creative with User Testing
I’ve worked at large companies where you can do focus groups and formalized user surveys. However, when resources are limited, you may need to apply some ingenuity to your approach to user testing.
We work in the stream we have, collaborating with our customer experience and sales teams to get user input. This is particularly helpful during the development stages. These teams help by:
- Sharing their sales notes so we can quantify requests and look for trends to help with prioritization.
- Including us in conference event post-mortems so we hear prospect and audience reaction to demos and presentations.
- Identifying opportunities to invite us into a customer call to show rough wire frames and start to build a rapport with users and exchange ideas.
These are all good ways to get valuable user feedback to help UX designers continue to improve the product.
Closing Thoughts
Working in a lean team environment can be extremely empowering. At Tidal Cyber we’re using it as an opportunity to put customers first and innovate quickly through collaboration, communication, supporting tools, and creative approaches. Your design team may be small, but when you have an entire company in your arsenal, the impact is mighty.
