Design is a Team Sport
In the past, when companies saw that they needed something designed, they hired a designer. Makes sense.
Say the company needed a standard brochure website to publicize what they do and how to reach them. And maybe they wanted to optimize the designs of some emails. The designer was able to handle these types of requests.
Limitations of the one-designer approach
Then software companies got big. Tech companies realized the designs of their software interfaces needed work. So it made sense to hire a designer for that, too.
Maybe that worked okay at first. But today’s software products are massively complex, forming the foundations of billion-dollar companies and incorporating dozens of flows for numerous user types in various contexts.
The flows are interrelated, with dependencies on various internal systems. Updating them requires approval from multiple internal stakeholders, plus legal and accessibility reviewers.
The process of designing or updating a flow like this and shepherding it through the necessary approvals—with all the negotiations that entails—is the definition of a complex problem. And we’re learning that complex problems are best solved by teams with cognitive diversity.
The solution: multidisciplinary teams
Just as we wouldn’t expect one engineer to take responsibility for front-end development, back-end development, and quality assurance testing, we shouldn’t expect one designer to take responsibility for design, research, and content for a complex enterprise product or platform. Yet we do this routinely.
Staffing a multidisciplinary design team on each product makes sense for two reasons:
Design requires an array of skills, potentially encompassing research, visual design, animation, writing, information architecture, project management, and more. Specialists at each task perform better than a single generalist. (For more on this, see Jakob Nielsen’s video “The UX Unicorn Myth.”)
Due to their varied training and experiences, multidisciplinary design team members also bring cognitive diversity to the team.
The multidisciplinary team’s secret weapon
Cognitive diversity refers to “differences in perspective or information processing styles” (source: HBR). A team made up of people from various disciplines supplies that diversity.
UX designers usually have skills in, among other things, visual design. Content designers can write well. Researchers know how to design an effective study, then gather and analyze data.
So when it comes to understanding a complex problem:
A UX designer may use visual methods like wireframing and sketching
A content designer may rely on narrative techniques, like a “Talk Bubbles” exercise
A researcher may draw on quantitative methods, like surveying or A/B testing
After studying design organizations, Professor Jeanne Liedtka from the University of Virginia reports (in her unpublished talk “Investing in Innovation: Measuring the impact of Design Thinking”) that forming cognitively diverse teams is a significant predictor of five outcomes:
Improved implementation and adaptation
Individual psychological benefits
Network capability and resource enhancement
Increased solution quality
Trust building
Other researchers report similar findings:
Cognitively diverse teams are more likely to actually solve complex problems.
Higher cognitive diversity correlated with better performance, including faster problem solving.
And support for multidisciplinary teams doesn’t just come from academia. Kylie Hansen, the Director of Content Design at Microsoft, reports that forming multidisciplinary UX teams by adding content designers to Microsoft’s design teams delivered the following measurable benefits:
Increased NPS scores by 8 points
Solved 44% of task failures
Boosted usability by 92%
Increased active users and customer retention
Struggling to solve a complex problem?
Maybe your team needs a shot of cognitive diversity. According to Scott Page, author of The Difference, a cognitively diverse team has a better chance of creating a high-quality solution than even the highest-performing single practitioner or homogenous team.
Of course, leaders may raise objections (such as headcount cost) to staffing a multidisciplinary team. And your team’s structure and processes matter, too. Let’s look at those issues in a future article.