DesignOps
When I started working at a company, UX was something totally new to them. During the years, our main focus was to create a UX culture and eliminate the idea that we were only UI designers and that user experience was limited to drawing interfaces.
Due to our routine and team immaturity, some processes ended up getting left behind. It was from this point that I started an Ops process. Below I describe how I worked with the team to identify, and apply improvements and good practices. Here my role was as an UX Lead.
1
Recognizing the Problem
During these years as an uxer, if there is something that I learned is that in many cases it’s best to help people identify problems on their own instead of just point it out of nowhere.
With this in mind, I did a team dynamic based on the Team Canvas, where besides talking about or mission and goals, we also had an open talk about the difficulties faced on our day to day and pain points.
2
Improvement Opportunities
This workshop allowed us to identify what and where were the significant gaps in our way of work that affected directly the team's performance and productivity. Some of the things identified were:
- Communication an exchange between designer was unsatisfactory;
- Work requests came lacking information;
- Figma files disorganization;
- Lack of components patterns;
- Data and research repository disorganized;
- Difficulty to know what method to use in each of the double diamond phases.
3
Prioritization and Distribution
Since many gaps were identified, it was necessary to divide the work load between the team to guarantee that where we were able to apply changes but also stay up to date to our daily job. Each designer received a topic to work on, where its role was to think about improvements that could be done and structure actions to take to a group discussion.
The positive point about this approach was that besides making changes come in faster, it also helped each team member develop itself. They learned about being owner of a project, having to stick to a timeline, managing workload, team communications, etc.
My role during this phase was to also work on some topics and help out team members with their projects.
Results
Some of the improvements and process created were:
- A knowledge base about UX methods that helps in the day-to-day work and also in the contextualization of new team members;
- Work request template requesting important information;
- Research data organized on Notion and the creation of quarter projects;
- Creation of Figma file templates with a description system for the designs that help sole doubts of the technical team.
