Category: Design Team

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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 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!