UX at Adjust: Putting cross-functionality at the heart of our development process

At Adjust, we don’t just want to help grow your app - we want you to love using our product too. This is why we put cross-functional collaboration at the heart of our development process, driven by teams laser-focused on user experience. Our interdisciplinary approach also allows us to better tackle a broad range of issues faced by our clients and deliver better UX solutions.

We want to give our clients a better understanding of how exactly your experience with the Adjust product is shaped. Today, we’ll be looking at this approach in detail - starting with how exactly Adjust defines UX, what cross-functional collaboration looks like in action, and how this has helped us better prepare clients for the upcoming iOS 14 privacy changes.

This process is constantly evolving, so we’d also like to invite you to share your feedback and insights on new and existing Adjust features. After sign-up, you’ll be invited to participate in our UX research studies, where you’ll help to improve the Adjust dashboard experience and shape it to better fit your needs.

Building an experienced UX team that can effectively address client concerns at scale is one of our core missions. We want to be able to respond efficiently to demands and requirements from the industry while providing meaningful, useful and easy-to-use solutions. To achieve this, we needed to place UX front and center of our strategy.

UX-mature companies are characterized by their ability to combine UX research and UX and UI design into their product development lifecycles. At Adjust we have two separate teams, UX Research and Product Design, which work hand in hand to deliver new features and improvements. Our UX Researchers lay the groundwork, uncovering and categorizing interaction problems within the Adjust dashboard. This comes from both listening to user feedback and challenging existing assumptions. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research methods, the team then informs design decisions and guides the overall product strategy. Our researchers also ensure that new designs are usable, user-optimized, and seamless following launch.

Our Product Designers solve user challenges conceptually, meaning they translate ideas into mockups and prototypes while balancing the user journey with technical feasibility. They also manage the aesthetic component, making sure designs adhere to industry-wide standards that also hit the mark in relation to the Adjust design system.

Our clients come from a range of industry verticals and regions, and all have diverse needs and issues. This means finding solutions isn’t always such a straightforward process - and that’s where the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration comes into play. Coming up with engineering solutions and ensuring they are developed and shipped on time naturally leads to cross-functional work. This is also where our focus on building a stellar team pays off, as we have experts at all stages of the solution process.

At the discovery stage, the UX Researcher unearths the user’s needs and problems, before structuring and categorizing them. The insights from this research are then passed onto the Product Designers, where ideas are shaped and conceptualized. Our Product Managers oversee and direct the development of the solution, scope the shaped ideas and keep the product vision and strategy in check. They also prioritize all facets of the solution based on the technical information fed in from the developers.

Further down the process, our researchers test early prototypes for usability and report back to the designers who integrate it into their design. The designers then collaborate with the developers to understand the technical limitations and requirements that affect the designs. Quality assurance testers then come into the fold to make sure the software is bug-free.

Product content strategists take care of any copy, manage localization and work with our Marketing team to promote new solutions to clients. Capping off the process, the UX researchers evaluate how users are adopting the solution and whether it has been a success, leading to a virtuous cycle of learning, growing and repeating.

We implemented the same cross-functionality process in June this year, when Apple announced their changes to iOS 14 user privacy. Given the significant impact the IDFA opt-in requirement would have on app developers, we immediately started investigating how we could help our clients develop solid UX strategies that would take both technical constraints and their unique product requirements into account.

We landed on an unconventional approach - setting up a cross-functional team consisting of members from Product Management, Product Content Strategy, UX Research and Technical Solutions to advise clients on how to best develop a UX strategy for the user opt-in on iOS 14. We took the time to understand our clients’ individual concerns and tackled them as if they were our own.

Because the whole interdisciplinary team was present during the sessions with our clients, we were also able to respond to a broad range of questions. Our Solutions Specialist addressed technical issues and constraints, the UX Researcher covered the ins and outs of A/B testing, while the Product Manager and Product Content Strategist were able to explain how technical limitations and unknowns would affect the client’s current UX strategy, both the user flow and at the interface level.

The feedback from clients has been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s been extremely rewarding to work as their true partner to shape and test successful strategies for user opt-in. You can read about some of the advice we gave in our latest ebook, Mobile advertising on iOS 14: The marketer’s guide to securing user opt-in. All of this is in addition to our releases on the technical side, such as our first-to-market iOS 14-compliant SDK with support for ATT and SKAdNetwork, launching our SKAdNetwork BETA with dynamic conversion value setting and raw data export, and full SKAdNetwork KPI reporting and data visualization.

By speaking to and working alongside a large number of clients over the last few months, we’ve realized how much value our interdisciplinary expertise is able to provide - particularly when it comes to bringing tailored solutions to clients.

Another positive side-effect of the process was that it allowed us to form even stronger relationships with our clients, by getting a closer glimpse into their day-to-day work and processes. These insights have allowed us to further enrich our customer understanding and drive our product design process on a more sophisticated level.

While there may be a lot of uncertainty in the industry at the moment, we are committed to assisting our clients in the most hands-on way possible. Our goal is to ensure our clients’ businesses can successfully, effectively and smoothly adapt to the upcoming changes - so if you require any advice or assistance related to iOS 14 and how to prepare for securing user opt-in, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to schedule in a session with the team.

Finally, we urge anyone interested in taking part in our user studies to sign up here. Your feedback is essential to continue evolving and enhancing the Adjust dashboard experience, and we’d love to work to help it better fit your needs.