Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
On 23 Jan 2008, at 01:19, Todd Zaki Warfel wrote: On Jan 22, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: My experience tells me that the best ratio regardless is somewhere around 1 designer for every 4 to 6 engineers. BTW, I can only speak as an outie on this one, but I'd agree with this as a rough rule of thumb. I'd also say that I think this ratio tends to work out pretty well, at least in my experience as an outie. [snip] I'd go with that if the developers are integrated into the design process and are accepting of design issues (and vice versa). If the the developers aren't interesting 1 designer to every 1-3 developers seems to work better since you have to spend more time making sure that dumb things don't get misinterpreted. Cheers, Adrian *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
[IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
Hey fab folks - So I was at dinner the other night with the technical publications manager here at my company, and he mentioned that the STC had stats on how many documentation people a software company should have per software developer, in order for the tech pubs team to be optimally effective. Do we have anything like that for designers? Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) Thanks in advance (you'll be helping me build my empire and take over the world, of course) Cheers, - Billie * **** * * Billie Mandel | Manager, User Experience Design Research | OPENWAVE *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
My Present contract has approximately 50 developers to 3 Interaction Designers. Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) -- Joseph Rich Rogan President UX/UI Inc. http://www.jrrogan.com *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
Seems that it should be at least 50/50 designers/developers per project, no matter how many you have in the company. With huge back-end projects, the ratio could drop, as well as toward the end of a project (it depends, as long as the designers who were there, got their point across) Ultimately, I'd rather have just one designer at the start of a project than have to throw 50 at the end of one. Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Billie Mandel Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 3:18 PM To: IxDA Discuss Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers Hey fab folks - So I was at dinner the other night with the technical publications manager here at my company, and he mentioned that the STC had stats on how many documentation people a software company should have per software developer, in order for the tech pubs team to be optimally effective. Do we have anything like that for designers? Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) Thanks in advance (you'll be helping me build my empire and take over the world, of course) Cheers, - Billie * **** * * Billie Mandel | Manager, User Experience Design Research | OPENWAVE *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
Ouch, Rich, I feel the pain :-). I'd add that with the 50/50 ratio, the structures of both sides should be the same, i.e. the head of X-Wing engineering should have a parallel X-Wing product manager/design counterpart. The two sides work collaboratively during design research, ideation, and validation. I've seen that formula work well. - Nasir *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
On Jan 22, 2008, at 12:18 PM, Billie Mandel wrote: Do we have anything like that for designers? Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) The rule I always use as a rough estimate is that one designer can create enough work for 4 to 6 developers or engineers. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
My situation is: 3 designers - we do UCD research (what is UCD anyway? Kidding, KIDDING!) interaction visual design, and we don't write any code at all. The rest of our IT shop is about 70 strong - that includes front and back end engineers and database admins. Jeff On Jan 22, 2008 4:08 PM, Todd Zaki Warfel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 22, 2008, at 3:26 PM, Bryan Minihan wrote: Ultimately, I'd rather have just one designer at the start of a project than have to throw 50 at the end of one. [depending on what you define as a designer...] Most of our projects have 1-2 interaction designers, 1-2 visual designers, 1-2 presentation layer designer/developers, and 3-20 or more developers. In short, it's typically very skewed in favor of development. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. -- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com -- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
I'm realizing that there are a few buckets to think about: - Consulting firms - Internal design teams And within each of those, - Involvement of the design team from start to finish - Throwing the design over the wall (generally agreed to be bad, but still happens) The model I described earlier is for product groups inside the company, each of which employs designers, who can be internal or external. - N *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
Over the last 5 years here is the breakdown from my experience: Kayak.com 1 IA/IxD (me) 4 engineers Gather.com 1 IA/IxD (me) 1 visual designer, 3 engineers AIR Worldwide 1 IA/IxD (me) 55 engineers (and 4 major product lines) - [no visual designer, no usability] Current 1 IA/IxD (me) 2.5 full time engineers Totally anecdotal - but for small start-ups - 1:4 ratio seems to be great, AIR didn't believe in user experience or design - so I thought they were an outlier - but given what I have seen so far posted - maybe that is more the norm -- ~ will Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems --- will evans user experience architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- On Jan 22, 2008 4:19 PM, Jeff White [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My situation is: 3 designers - we do UCD research (what is UCD anyway? Kidding, KIDDING!) interaction visual design, and we don't write any code at all. The rest of our IT shop is about 70 strong - that includes front and back end engineers and database admins. Jeff *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
One thing about our design strategy - there is no over the wall approach. Ever. We're doing Agile (Scrum) here, so that goes out the window, and much much more depends on talking with engineers very heavily throughout the entire development lifecycle. We're doing role sharing to some degree, so education/knowledge sharing/mentoring is another huge part of the equation for us right now. Jeff On Jan 22, 2008 4:27 PM, Nasir Barday [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm realizing that there are a few buckets to think about: - Consulting firms - Internal design teams And within each of those, - Involvement of the design team from start to finish - Throwing the design over the wall (generally agreed to be bad, but still happens) The model I described earlier is for product groups inside the company, each of which employs designers, who can be internal or external. - N *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
On Jan 22, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Nasir Barday wrote: - Consulting firms - Internal design teams My estimate, fwiw, doesn't matter if its for an internal team or external team. My experience tells me that the best ratio regardless is somewhere around 1 designer for every 4 to 6 engineers. Also, if you do the visual/interaction split on the team, the you effectively have 1.5 designers to figure out the numbers. The 1 visual plus 1 interaction designer doesn't equate to 2 people's worth of work in the same way 2 designers who can do both the visual and interaction design simultaneously. Practically speaking, the volume of work that either a designer generates that needs to be built, or the volume of design that needs to be created from the amount built by the engineers works out to this ratio. Approximately speaking. I can't imagine how a team of 3 designers can practically work with a team of 50 engineers. It would either the designers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what needs to spec'd and designed, or the engineers are sitting around creating their own design if there is a lack of work spec'd out, or both. Also, as another rough estimate, I treat needing 1 researcher per 3 to 5 designers on a team. If you have a team of 10 designers, you're going to need around 2 to 3 researchers to adequately cover the spread of information needed to be gathered and researched effectively. Again, this is an approximation, but I think it holds up well enough for budgeting and planning purposes. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
Andrei, I totally agree 3 to 50 is a bad ratio, but it can work in a practical, not necessarily optimal way: First of all everything has to be caveated by it depends..., what are you building, what are the dynamics of the solution, what are the designers responsibilities, what other teams can be leveraged. In my case, (which is actually more than 50 devs to 3, or I should say 3 1/2 designers, as we have a part time visual designer), the backend engineers have 3 entirely different systems they have to interface our application with, which causes factoral levels of effort compared to an enclosed/single system. As well we leverage training/help desk and support for feedback and testing, and via a Feature Driven Design Process, SME's are invovled with every design decision. We design pattern libraries and templates, then follow/leverage these in design. With good task flows/scenarios/requirements building out screens can be done very rapidly. So it is doable, but we could use another 5 to 10 people given our focus expanded to own responsibilities, which we are presently leveraging other teams for. Andrei wrote: I can't imagine how a team of 3 designers can practically work with a team of 50 engineers. It would either the designers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what needs to spec'd and designed, or the engineers are sitting around creating their own design if there is a lack of work spec'd out, or both. -- Joseph Rich Rogan President UX/UI Inc. http://www.jrrogan.com *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
For pricing, we've been going with 25 percent requirements gathering, 50 percent development, and 25 percent quality assurance as a starting point for projects. The ratios may change, but I once worked on a team where Product Management was 1, dev was 3, UI design was 1, and QA was 1, and that team ran like a well oiled machine. Patrick -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Billie Mandel Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 11:18 AM To: IxDA Discuss Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers Hey fab folks - So I was at dinner the other night with the technical publications manager here at my company, and he mentioned that the STC had stats on how many documentation people a software company should have per software developer, in order for the tech pubs team to be optimally effective. Do we have anything like that for designers? Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) Thanks in advance (you'll be helping me build my empire and take over the world, of course) Cheers, - Billie * **** * * Billie Mandel | Manager, User Experience Design Research | OPENWAVE *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
we run with 1 product, 1 designer (who shares UI design with product), 1 QA and 4 dev and it works pretty well for us. we bang out releases fairly consistently with few hiccups. On 1/22/08, Patrick Neeman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For pricing, we've been going with 25 percent requirements gathering, 50 percent development, and 25 percent quality assurance as a starting point for projects. The ratios may change, but I once worked on a team where Product Management was 1, dev was 3, UI design was 1, and QA was 1, and that team ran like a well oiled machine. Patrick -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Billie Mandel Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 11:18 AM To: IxDA Discuss Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers Hey fab folks - So I was at dinner the other night with the technical publications manager here at my company, and he mentioned that the STC had stats on how many documentation people a software company should have per software developer, in order for the tech pubs team to be optimally effective. Do we have anything like that for designers? Anyone done any work determining what the relative size of the design team to the dev team should be overall for a software dev shop? (Yes, I know, it depends, but a ratio range would certainly be useful) Thanks in advance (you'll be helping me build my empire and take over the world, of course) Cheers, - Billie * **** * * Billie Mandel | Manager, User Experience Design Research | OPENWAVE *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- -- www.flyingyogi.com -- *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
On Jan 22, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: I can't imagine how a team of 3 designers can practically work with a team of 50 engineers. It's called patterns:). Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. -- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com -- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
On Jan 22, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: My experience tells me that the best ratio regardless is somewhere around 1 designer for every 4 to 6 engineers. BTW, I can only speak as an outie on this one, but I'd agree with this as a rough rule of thumb. I'd also say that I think this ratio tends to work out pretty well, at least in my experience as an outie. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. -- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com -- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers
I've done that before. You end up training the developers to design in patterns. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Todd Zaki Warfel Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 4:18 PM To: Andrei Herasimchuk Cc: IxDA Discuss Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Ratio of designers to developers On Jan 22, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: I can't imagine how a team of 3 designers can practically work with a team of 50 engineers. It's called patterns:). Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. -- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com -- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
