A typical UX meeting scene involves plenty of suggestions and ideas being thrown around everywhere. It’s not very uncommon to see people swaying from the meeting agenda.

But every UX team “deserves” an effective meeting. This is when the entire team is updated on the progress of the project. While meetings can be a productivity disaster for many teams, it is extremely effective for some UX teams.

Let’s dig in to find out how effective UX meetings actually happen.

Goal and outcome setting

Everyone at the meeting should understand the agenda of the meeting. Too often, meetings happen without a concrete understanding of what’s going to happen. This prevents people from preparing well for the meeting.

Also, during a meeting that involves various stakeholders, explain the current stage of design process. When you explain well, you’ll not drive suggestions that are out of context. For example, not many understand that you may be at the wireframe stage, but would still give feedback on colors and fonts. You should focus on driving the right feedback at the right time.

Meeting with all stakeholders

It is a good idea to include all the stakeholders of the project in ideally once every three meetings. This is important especially in the case of senior leaders. When the senior management is not kept in the loop for a while, it so often happens that they come in at the end and change the entire design direction. This is highly undesirable especially since the work of the entire team is put into jeopardy.

To prevent this from happening, every single stakeholder should be updated on the progress of the project ideally once every 3 meetings.

Separate meetings with Designers, Developers & End users

To capture better quality feedback, effective UX teams conduct separate meetings with their design team, development team and the end users. This will lead to a high quality product in the end. With the design team, conduct brainstorming sessions to encourage various design ideas.

With the development team, discuss the development feasibility of your designs, UI response behavior and application performance. They can give a better idea of what can and cannot be implemented. Consulting with them right from the beginning can ensure that you don’t design features that is outside the scope of the chosen technology stack.

You may schedule meetings with end users to validate your thought processes and also to gather user feedback

Use collaborative tools

Not all meetings happen face-to-face. And UX design can’t be executed without collaboration with stakeholders. This is when collaborative tools like Invision, Google docs, Atlassian or teamviewer come in handy. You will be able to collaborate much better internally and externally with them.

Especially if you have remote teams, you will almost be compelled to use them. For example, when you need updates from teammates on your wireframe, sending emails back and forth would easily become inconvenient after a while. At that point, you’ll have to rely on collaborative tools like Invision.

Conclude the meetings well

A good meeting will be confusing for all parties, if not concluded well. Towards the end of meetings, conclude with a list of action items. These action items along with a timeline to get them done will correctly set expectations for the next meeting.

Too often people fail to implement the points that were discussed in the meeting. Having a list of action items along with a timeline will go a long way in ensuring that the project is completed within the stipulated timeline.

This is how effective UX meetings happen at some of the best UX teams. When everyone listens, asks questions and gives insights, they can pave the way for truly experiential products.