Setting up UX office hours in your organization

Extend your impact beyond your capacity.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

As we all know, UX Designers often work with PM and Engineering teams that outnumber them, sometimes at the expense of high-quality designs and proper fit-and-finish. The agile nature of our roles keeps us focused on designing the next big feature, making it challenging to prioritize end-to-end quality over quantity, especially in corporations with large portfolios and siloed products.

Enter UX Office Hours (OH) — a structured yet informal weekly meeting where designers can extend their influence beyond their immediate product teams, fostering cohesion and consistency.

We first started Office Hours out of necessity

Our design team inherited a portfolio of over 20 developer tools, with just five UX designers of varying seniority. Scaling was a challenge, and our product partners had little to no exposure to Design, as the tools had been developed by necessity by developers.

In a portfolio of 20 products, only half can be allocated by 5 UX designers. Image by author using Material 3 Avatars and Fluent Emojis.

Office Hours allowed us to evangelize the value of UX, establish ourselves as subject matter experts, and catch mistakes that might have otherwise reached production.

UX Office Hours can provide consultations for the products without dedicated UX support assigned to them. Image by author using Material 3 Avatars and Fluent Emojis.

We started an Office Hours pilot with a 1-hour weekly meeting. We allowed product teams to sign up for different slots in an Excel sheet. To our surprise, our agenda quickly filled up.

There was a clear need for clarity and a strong appetite for quality work.

5 years later, Office Hours is still going strong

We defer around 15%-20% of our UX requests to it, have achieved full accessibility compliance across multiple tools, kickstarted baseline UX for new product offerings…