You want to boost app usability. How can you foster collaboration between developers and UX designers?

This is a rule of thumb for any teamwork and an effective way to bust silos. One of my mentors taught me to never give a single task. Lean theory and throughput accounting measure the outcome of a value stream, as opposed to the more traditional cost-accounting model of measuring the costs of individual steps. What I have found most effective is that nobody gets to call success until a feature is done. That means, the UX expert isn't done until development, testing, and deployment occur. The other side of this, if we have a problem, we all get dinged. (This one is harder because it seems unfair that I get in trouble when someone else makes the mistake.)

I work very closely with a UX designer and we think very differently. We view the world differently. It takes practice, along with respect, psychological safety, and true ownership of all of the result, not just where our specialties lie. I often make suggestions to UX design as I (try) to put myself in the customer's shoes. He makes suggestions on the type of data and the features that support the design. But it is easy to say respect, and safety, and ownership. They need to be translated into concrete practices. Here are a few go-to book recommendations: 1) The Anatomy of Peace: life-changing perspective on human communication and respect. 2) The Responsibility Process: insightful model that is extremely practical for ownership.

We did this once - half of it - devs read about and attempted to build UX designs. You don't want techies like myself getting anywhere near UX. But it was humbling AND I learned about the process of UX design as well as vocabulary that helped our communication. I'm not so sure it works the other way around. We have never found an effective way for QA engineers to learn coding effectively, that is the SDTest role is much more effective when a developer learns to test. Developers work massive hours and invest years in learning to code. I think this maybe the same when UX tries to code. That is my hypothesis, but I have no direct experience.

This is extremely important. It is well written. I'd like to share what happens in many organizations instead as a warning, not a recommendation: All too often developers are the center of the world and everyone else is a second class citizen. They dictate "what can and cannot be done" and often pressure UX designers to create a workflow that matches what they think needs to be done. As you can imagine, this leads to bad interaction design, but even more, to affects collaboration because there is a lack of respect, which leads to a toxic environment.