UX Maturity Boost

UX Maturity Boost

Embarking on a project with a new client aimed at enhancing the maturity of their UX team, I encountered a significant lack of standard processes within the team. Each designer operated independently, often retrofitting screen designs to match engineering-led solutions, resulting in a fragmented workflow.

Service Design Tools & Methods - The 'Idealistic' process poster

To address this, I developed a comprehensive poster outlining the product development process, along with associated UX and Service design activities. While my intention was to align the team around this idealistic framework, the feedback revealed overwhelming concerns about time constraints and a steep learning curve associated with unfamiliar activities.

Leadership expressed reluctance to enforce a rigid process, citing concerns about feasibility and resource constraints. This prompted a shift in approach towards a more tailored and manageable solution.

What I undertook...

Conducting a survey and face-to-face interviews with team members across all levels, from interns to directors, alongside the addition of a UX designer and researcher, unveiled several common pain points, including time constraints for research, limited user access, and low confidence in solutions.

Recognising the need for a simplified approach, we collaborated to develop a streamlined process focusing on activities aligned with the team's interests and aimed at addressing identified pain points. The goal was to foster alignment within the team before presenting the concept to senior leadership for support.

Simplified UX Strategy Infographic

We talked again with team members. Prior to the interviews, we provided them with the proposed process document and encouraged them to come prepared with their thoughts, questions, concerns, and ideas. However, it became immediately evident that there was confusion surrounding the artefacts. Many expressed difficulty in understanding how to interpret the document, navigate its sections, and understand the relationship between different content elements.

While team members grasped the suggested activities, they expressed a desire for more clarity on how to execute them in their own projects. The distinction between sections and question tiles proved to be confusing, and the concept of how the UX outcome corresponds to answering the fundamental question of achieving our corporate mission was overlooked or misunderstood.

Take my own advice...

Reviewing the feedback, I recognised a misstep in our approach—we had deviated from our established process. Despite completing the discovery phase and identifying pain points, we had prematurely transitioned to high-fidelity visuals.

Taking our own advice, we took a step back and realigned with our process. This involved dedicating more time to defining our objectives, ensuring they met the needs of our designers and addressed their concerns. We engaged in collaborative brainstorming sessions with the wider team, exploring diverse ideas and multiple paths.

Through this collaborative and iterative refinement, we revamped our visual representation of the process using Figma. Leveraging this tool, designers could seamlessly navigate their progress, access activities to advance their work, and easily refer to "how-to" guides and documentation for self-directed implementation.

In addition to this, we introduced a calendar system that proactively notified team members of upcoming UX and research activities. This initiative aimed to foster participation and engagement, providing opportunities for exposure to new methods and tools that they may not have been utilised before.

As well as the revamped process, we crafted a storybook-style narrative outlining how to solve human problems. This narrative served as an easy learning tool for anyone seeking to understand the value, and the what and why behind each step.

Using the process to design our process was a powerful tool for proving its benefit. Our proposal to integrate the process documentation into the design system, coupled with articulating the benefits to the business in terms of alignment with mission statements and goals, a boost in UX maturity, collaboration enhancement, and heightened confidence in proposed solutions, garnered support from the senior UX team. This endorsement empowered designers to allocate time for conducting necessary activities to build confidence into proposed designs.

Human-centric UX Design Process - Figma Concept '24

Summary...

Despite the challenge of striking a balance between the ideal and the pragmatic, our adoption of the process has yielded remarkable successes:

I've come to appreciate the significance of adhering to the process, which has led to the creation of superior designs and enriched user experiences.

The maturity of the team has experienced a significant boost, with both new and seasoned designers embracing the process, its activities, and guidelines in their projects. Many are now undertaking tasks they had previously never ventured into.

Research now receives time investment, resulting in a deeper understanding of problems and the emergence of recurring patterns, which in turn has led to solutions benefiting multiple users rather than just addressing individual customer needs.

The broader team is increasingly recognizing the value of early collaboration, resulting in solutions that are not only viable but also feasible and desirable even before they reach the development stage. This alignment and confidence in our designs have significantly enhanced the speed at which we can deliver value to our customers.