Challenges & Accomplishments

Back in 2019, I joined the Operative as the first in-house designer based at the US office. My UX manager Lan joined in after two weeks. So, there were three in-house designers (one in Israel) and two out-source designers to start this adventure. The Operative started to build their own Design Team!

What were the challenges?

• No well-structured process to support end-to-end design delivery

• Lack of efficient communication across PMs, engineers and designers

• Unfriendly user experience and outdated UI style

• Not sufficient designer resources to hands on work

Results | what I’ve accomplished

• I established an Operative suited Design Process for product development to improve the efficiency and communication across teams

• I worked with the team to built the Design System from scratch including the Style guide/UI library and UX patterns

• I created a space on Confluence for design documentation and tracking the process improvement

• I worked with directors to expand the team and transform design tasks into the agile environment with the new UX sprint process

My UX Manager and the best mentor Lan passed away accidentally at the beginning of the lockdown in 2020. I stepped out to take more responsibilities as a team leader and started to work on process improvement. Until 2021 June, we have a new UX director joined the team.

My Design Questions

How can we support design development as a team for end-to-end design delivery?

In which way can we improve communication and efficiency across PMs, designers and engineers?

What should we do to better understand AOS users and create a user-friendly experience for them?

How can I apply Design Thinking to solve our current problems?

How I initiated the Conversation

Before jumping quickly to find out solutions, I conducted 1/1 calls and across team meetings to collect feedback and hear from different perspectives, which helps me a lot to narrow down the focus and prioritize tasks of process improvement.

Process improvement should always be working in progress instead of in place in one step, thanks to all my colleagues and managers being very supportive, we have been trial and error and modification. The design process has been established in the mid of 2020, make sure the end-to-end design delivery, keep on track the project progress in a sustainable way and improve communication across teams, furthermore, let people aware of it's important to understand users to make any design decisions.

Design Process Overview

Just because the Design Process tells us to do a lot of things, that doesn’t mean all of them to make sense everywhere and every time. We learned from double diamond in design thinking and after few months of process improvement tests, I created this journey map to explain how should a designer do when initiating a design task.

How can designers enhance their understanding of end users at the start of the design process?

There are various user roles on AOS platform, such as Sales Manager, Account Executive, and etc. Each design ticket may kickoff different design questions for different users. I focused on creating user personas and ways to streamline comprehension during the design process.

Design Questions

• How can we make communication and collaboration easier between PMs and designers?

• How might we efficiently provide the user info when the PM and the designer kick off a new design task/ticket?

What I did

I hosted several brainstorming sessions and conducted questionnaires to customers. Then I worked with PMs to clean up our user persona files, sorted out different user roles by module, and created a quick user info picker on Excel, the user persona template.

Deliverable

User persona template is like a quick user persona “generator”, PMs can pick the role from the first screen. It will pull out the related persona info. There are lists of questions about what and why we need this design on the second screen, which quickly guides PMs to think from users’ perspectives when creating a new ticket and helps communicate an essential user background to the designer.

Design Documentations

Operative UX is a collection of documents and resources that cover all aspects of the product design at Operative. I figured out the structure of this site with the UX director and UI lead, and built the initial release. It helps our team to keep track of all product development processes, including UX research & operations, across-team meeting notes, Common Components, UX backlog, UX learning & sharing, Onboarding materials, Design System doc&updates and etc.

We see this as a live site to continually update the structure or add new modules as we need. But definitely, well-structured documentation keeps everyone on the same page and brings a more efficient collaboration!

UX backlog collects potential design problems, like inconsistency, user feedback from previous meetings, research tasks and etc.

We are trying our best to run remote usability testing sessions during the pandemic and collect real users’ feedback.

Design System + Project Documentation

I worked with the design team and front-end engineering team to build our Design System from scratch following the Atomic Design methodology. I mainly contributed to color palette guidelines, context menu dropdowns, interactive icons, and popups.

From Sketch, Zeplin to the online library built, I researched and tried ways with the team for better document updates across the company. And I worked with the Principle Software Engineer/UI Lead to establish the Common Component review process, which is a sustainable way to keep the design system up-to-date and solved inconsistency, keeping everyone on the same page.

Here is the 👉AOS Theme Azul, an online style guide if you are interested.

Takeaway | What I learned 🦉

All of these process-related tasks helped me to develop communication skills and thinking on applying Design Thinking to solve daily real-world problems. “Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.” I appreciated getting such a challenge at the early stage of my career, that thinking from a high level to improve design deliveries and facilitate design sprints.

What I learned:

• understand the surroundings, the stakeholders, the business and the users before making decisions

• improvement is always work-in-progress, keep testing and collecting feedback from different perspectives

• document everything to keep track of each progress and get engaged, including trial and errors

• do simple and think about how to make others easier to get their work done