Foundations for a successful UX team
It’s not a secret anymore that every organisation that produces ANY type of PRODUCT or provides ANY type of SERVICE needs to have digital presence in order to battle the competition and gain customer’s attention.
Since 2011, companies started to understand the importance of software as a part of successful business. This caused UX designers being in a shocking demand, and let’s be honest — the market is still growing. UX design has quickly become one of the most attractive and well paid segments in the interactive industry.
Accordingly to Adobe’s studies conducted in 2017 — 87% percent of managers said hiring more UX designers is the top priority for their organisation: higher than graphic designers (76%) and product managers (74%), and tied with software engineers for top spot.
The benefits of having a designer onboard may be obvious to the organisation, however many raise same questions:
How to hire a designer? How to pick a good designer? What is needed in order to have an internal design team successfully contributing to the business? What are the conditions that design team will need to do the job?
Getting started
Often when rushing to get first designer onboard and start producing the work— it is forgotten to give attention to setting a proper foundation for the design. In order to have a ground for a strong team and set course for a quality output — few foundations need to be in place.
Focused Leadership
In order to maximise the effect of having a in-house designer — a focused leadership has to be in place. Leadership - that is not only able to take team’s internal understanding and translate it to the rest of the company, but be ready to help digesting business goals into the team’s vision.
Smaller design teams usually report to Product Management (Product Owner, Chief Product Office, VP of Product, etc.). Usually it is a good fit, as designers are aligned with a product vision and can contribute to it too. Later, when team grow s— good practice is to pick a Design Lead, who will be treating design as autonomous discipline and fight for it’s executive access.
Placing a designer under a technical manager, who is leading couple of other engineering teams at the same time, can be an expensive mistake. This way the needs of design will be treated same as development, being placed under unnatural to design schedule and rhythm. This usually leads to failed attempts to discuss big ideas and receive feedback on creative matters.
Another common mistake will be placing a designer under the management of extremely attentive to the details leader, who prefers dictating and chewing up the solutions for the team, instead of giving them space and flexibility to do the job. Great design needs freedom for creativity, nurturing and leadership!
Alignment with business goals!
Very often designers are striving for design-for-design’s-sake way of working, where the focus on using the latest trends and innovation in design is bigger than focus on business values. I believe exactly this fact have contributed to the matter that most business stakeholders treat designers as “makers of something pretty” rather than “producers of things that work good”.
More experienced designers embrace business values, realising that they can be a powerful contribution to the design process. Therefore, a good task for a designer during his first days at your organisation — will be to go through the business strategy, vision and values to understand where design can contribute.
Junior or Senior at start?
A question that many hiring managers will ask themselves - what level of experience do we bring in first? Junior and Senior designers are very different in many aspects, but both can be useful and add value in their own ways.
Junior designer will be more open to jump on ANY type of challenge that you will prepare for her (from graphical tasks to conducting user interviews). They usually have lots of energy to experiment and try out new methodologies that they have just brought out of the university. They enjoy hands-on work, from re-designing a navigation of your product to coming up with a new print for the company T-shirt.
The pay rate is way lower than what a senior designer would ask for, and it is a great match for a company that wants to learn about design and how to better apply it to business.
Senior designer will come with a bigger baggage of experience and will know what angle to attack problems from. The biggest advantage — they know that the goals of company are same important as the intentions of a user for who the product is being build for. They will ask questions about company strategy and will be working hard on aligning that vision to the design decisions.
Savvy designers may not be willing to be included into detailed design work and will try to outsource small requests that come in. Their main focus will be on growing design presence in the company and scaling up the team.
The pay check for a senior designer will contain out of a higher number, but most likely this will be faster reflected on customer satisfaction rates.
Trust in talking to REAL customers
Nothing makes the design output stronger than an empathy to the end-user. Observing people how they use your product, following them to their workspace, investigating why they have made one decision over the other — can boost the understanding of a user and assess product’s usability. While qualitative data and analytics can provide data as where the things aren’t working — observing real users behaviour can give an instant understanding on the why it is not working and find a quick way to fix it.
Many companies are doing a mistake of not letting designers to speak to users, see customer’s data and check-in with support teams. Access to this data may be a life changing experience not only for a designer, but also for the business itself, who always appear to think that they know everything about the user. Watch your designer talking to a customer and you will understand that there is no end to learning.
Buy-in with Product Team and Stakeholders
Business stakeholders and members of a Product Team will be your designer’s best partners when getting data to built better product. They will have an ongoing role in the product development by providing input at key milestones.
I recommend on-boarding Business and Product Team onto the main terminology and methods of user experience, to make sure designers get understanding on their process. I also recommend holding stakeholder workshops to collect their broad range of wants and needs. This allows designers to identify the business drivers and understand company values better.
Ideally, would be to teach the stakeholders some useful UCD techniques that they can use themselves. For example, paper prototyping or sketching can be a very effective tool when communicating requirements and feedback.
Early involvement
In order for designer to be able to make impact on a product’s usability and experience — they have to be involved from the beginning. By saying “beginning” — I don’t mean when developers just started to build a product, I mean when Product Team is brainstorming about product’s direction and specifications.
Not only designer can help validating and testing the assumptions by creating prototypes to test with REAL users, but also contribute to sharpen the requirements on the go. It is very easy to build a quick product prototype using modern design tools to validate that all assumptions are correct and customers will buy your solution. Designers can save your time and money, when involving them into the product planning.
Design quality standards
Letting your designer quickly jumping onto fixing problems, without documenting design language as she goes — can transform into lots of potential problems and inconsistencies at a later point, when they are much harder to fix. It is better to give designer a chance to create and grow Style Guide and Design System, rather than coming back to it later, when there is too many different styles used and it is too hard to scale down to using consistent elements.
And when team grows…
As design teams scales — there will be a need for more structure that can be added by putting design rituals in place and setting design team values. We can talk about this in my next blog posts ;)
