Category: Design Ops

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Design Design Ops Design Team UX UX Design

UX Cross Functional Collaboration

I’ve been looking at cross functional collaboration and training after reading posts on UX forums. It’s interesting stuff and also the views that go with this subject. I think it’s important and something that I’ve done for all of my design career.

Briefly, some benefits that can result from a well trained UX designer in your product team include improved collaboration and efficiency with wider product team. This results in a quicker time bringing products to market. A range of diverse perspectives will lead to more creative solutions and improved team adapatability.

Along with improved employee engagement there are clearly advantages to deepening your understanding the way your product team works. So start today and improve your collaboration and efficiency working with yur product team.

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Creative Design Ops Design Team

A Remote Design Team

Working remotely as a designer can be challenging, even more so if you’re managing a remote design team as a lead or senior designer. Fortunately we have a lot of collaboration tools available to us to help this method of working. Industry standard tools such as Miro where you and your team can work on user flows and ideation whilst working remotely.

If you’re working as a design lead then keeping in touch with your design team is a great way to keep on top of the team’s work schedule. Regular one to one meetings where you can check in and give direction are great. Design team meetings are also good, even better if you can hold face to face meetings if the team member’s locations allow this.

I find that having a dedicated office or working space really helps, somewhere to assign as a work space. So when the working day is completed you can close the door and “commute” to your lounge.

Maintaining focus in the working day is something that needs to be developed with a routine and a work pattern. This can be modified depending on the project work in hand but a routine really helps with day to day remote working.

Keeping a healthy work/life balance especially in the winter months when the days are short is key, this is where a home office comes into it’s own. Also working for a supportive company that allows remote location working is a plus as then you can work from different locations in the summer months which can be inspiring.

I hope that this is helpful and that this can help you as a designer working in a wider team or leading a design team.

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Design Design Ops Design Team Product design UI Usability UX UX Design

Internal Design Agency

I’m working on improving our product design across our live NHS solutions for our company. This process is to formalise our design resource with an organised approach to production with our wider product team. To implement this I’m starting to run my design team as an internal design agency with a group of ‘clients’ which are our business stakeholders and senior product owners.

Introducing a unified approach to our product design has multiple advantages and this will help us to innovate and explore the best ways to help our end users engage with and use our products. On an internal level we can manage and guide our stakeholders and product owners using a design to production process that is clear and accountable.

We can approach projects in the same way with clear phases of requirements gathering and ideation. Then moving to wireframe and prototype design and iteration. Once signed off we can support the development and test teams with efficient design hand overs to build out the agreed features that match the final designs.

As we progress I can refine our design to production process to streamline the way my design team works within our wider product team. I aim to fully integrate with the wider business and become an even more valuable internal digital design resource.

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Design Design Ops UX UX Design

UX Benchmarking

I’ve been working on implementing a UX Benchmarking strategy for our products. We’re gathering more data now and it’s going to be a busy year for us with new products coming to market.

UX Benchmarking is a great way to show our progress as our products develop and we get better at what we do. Being able to demonstrate how our users are responding to our systems in the real work will be great for our stakeholders.

Also UX Benchmarking is a valuable process and putting together our process has been an enjoyable process.

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Design Design Ops Design Team

Design Leadership

I’ve been reading around the subject of design leadership to apply to my current role. As I lead a design team I want to produce and see created the highest quality design work. For this to happen I aim to inspire my team members as much as possible.

Clear direction, team motivation and communication are key and this can be challenging as all of my team work remotely. This is the workplace post Covid so I use collaborative software and team calls to try and bridge this gap.

I trust my team to be as creative as possible as this is where innovation starts and seeing great design going into our product teams and the wider business is a good feeling!

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Design Design Ops UX

Design Teams

I’ve been working on expanding my design team to further support our product owners and development teams. Increased design capacity can help to support a wide range of visualisation and creative outputs that will benefit the whole company.

Getting the right fit is really improtant and ensuring that a new designer feels comfortable and welcome in the design team is key. Stakeholder engagement and being able to support projects in the discovery and elaboration phases is also on my radar. Also being able to provide prototypes for the sales team as they engage new clients becomes possible with more design team members.

I look forward to the new year with increased design capacity and more hands on my design deck. So we’re able to tackle the creative challenges that the new year will being!

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Design Design Ops Design Systems Digital Product design

UI Review and Design Systems

I’m leading on a UI review of one of our premium products looking at common UI components. This is to unify our front end to further improve the professional look and feel for this product and to ensure that our screens reflect our brand.

I’m also looking at UI consistency so that common elements render in the same way across all screens. This process helps this premium product to look professional and can be easily identified as one of our branded products in the marketplace.

Having a comprehensive collection of UI elements ensures that nothing is missed in our style guide. This helps to speed and streamline our development and test processes and increases our speed to market for new features.

This is also a positive step towards a future design system which would include code snippets for the UI elements. I’m very happy to contribute to this production process as it helps new starters and junior members of our scrum teams understand our approach to contemporary software production.

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Creative Design Ops Design Systems Mobile Product design UX

Mobile Style Guide

We’ve just released our mobile specific style guide, this builds on and compliments our desktop style guide which was released at the start of this year.

This guide is the latest collaboration with my design team, we have been working on this alongside new feature and BAU work. This guide captures our mobile optimised design patterns as they are designed and built into our app. The new guide also covers every component and design pattern that is currently live in our app.

Our new guide helps to ensure consistency as a single source of truth for our mobile development team and it will help with our onboarding process. It’s also another step towards a new design system that I hope to implement as a project that will further improve our new app feature to market speed.

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Creative Design Design Ops Digital Mobile Product design UI Web design

Mobile Style Guide

I’ve just completed a mobile style guide to support our product team and further define our brand’s look and feel. This builds on my previous style guide that included desktop, responsive web and mobile.

Following considerable back end improvements our mobile team where implementing I was able to review several components for our app. This gave me a great opportunity to review the UX of our core functionality, we were also able to update our UI styling to a more contemporary look and feel.

Our mobile specific components were originally contained in one page of our divison’s style guide. The app design review highlighted the common components for our app and desktop and the need for a dedicated mobile style guide has been realised. This gives us much more space to provide guidance, examples and use cases for our mobile optimised components.

The new mobile style guide now includes comprehensive details of our mobile components. This style guide also builds towards a future design system that we can build at a later date.

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Creative Design Design Ops Digital Product design UX UX Design

UX Brighton

Well it’s been a while! But I was very glad to having bought my ticket and headed into Brighton to attend this conference once again.

Really good to see it up and running again after the break for the pandemic and good to attend a design orientated conference. I also caught up with some old designer friends that I’ve previously worked with in Brighton.

There were some inspirational speakers with the day’s theme being focused on Product Design and Management. As ever I took lots of notes to mull over and themes to explore over the coming weeks.

UX Brighton always inspires me and I enjoy the takeaways that I can bring into my design practice and career.