Clearly, there is no User Experience or Product Design without a cohort of activities grouped under the umbrella of User Research. It is now a pre-requisite to a high "UX maturity" in the product cycle. Beyond their immediate value in guiding design and product decisions, research Insights are a powerful way for the Product Design team to gain visibility across the company.
Publishing findings is a new way of "blogging" inside a company. A head of User Research once told me that interview findings are also data point (i.e. analytics data) and it stayed with me. Also interviews and observation answer the "why" questions that Analytics can't answer.
At Salesforce we were "packaging" study goals and outcomes in a database and other formats so that senior management and other teams could learn about the product and re-use insights. Results can be "advertised" on Slack channels (or any channel commonly used internally). They should also be part of any formal design review to illustrate design decisions and explain context.
Data Driven Design, UXR
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Design Ops
Productivity and accountability are of course critical. Dominant tools designed to support the software development process (Jira among others) typically appear inadequate for the design cycle. Particularly if they are part of the "old school" of delivering lengthy Business Requirements broken down into Epics and Stories. In the early stages, Design "tasks" are not as clear cut, and due dates can change (e.g. schedule a customer for an interview can be unpredictable). Time boxing is possibly – and desirable – but uncertainty is of the essence. By definition, the upfront work done by designers is very undefined. Stories start to emerge as research takes places and design iterations help solidify solutions and even priorities. At which point it becomes easier to break down Epics and plan sprints.
The Opportunity Backlog Despite Jira and Scrum challenges, designers need to monitor progress (both outcome and output), rapidly shift gears if research gets stuck and see how their individual contributions fit in the team's deliverables. The faster ideas are sketched, the more they can iterate an adjust their design.
I was first introduced around 2013 to the work of Marty Cagan by Product Managers who threw away the time consuming Business Requirements process to adopt rapid prototyping as a way to describe and validate specs for developers. These also feed into the Product Backlog and roadmap delivery plan. I started experimenting with his Opportunity Backlog concept to manage design discovery in an Agile world.
New Crop of Tools There is also a new crop of designer friendly apps: at Salsify we quickly got into adopting Range.io for daily stand ups. We experimented with Asana as it evolved to offer a "portfolio" view to share status highlights that a CEO or Product Marketing manager can consume. Its adoption by Product Marketing ensured direct visibility of our work by that team and others.
Beyond the basics, like Figma, Sketch, Abstract or Invision, Design Systems (Google Material design or Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) have become critical to empower designers and speed up the handover to developers. Lack of investment in the appropriate design system means hours and days wasted creating interfaces or fixing inconsistencies.
Leadership:
Design Ops and Team Engagement
In 2013 when I joined Demandware, first I had the opportunity to scale a UX team – with its own cycle, process and tools – in a high growth company (we doubled in size from 500 to 1000). Second, I experienced Product Design scale at an entirely new level when we joined in 2016 a 200+ product designers eco-system within a company the size of Salesforce (30,000+ employees when we were acquired).
As we became Commerce Cloud, we embraced a state of the art Design System (SLDS) and expanded our repertoire of design patterns to include the Trailhead in-app on-boarding and learning components. We also refined and streamlined our process to better publish and share User Research findings and on-going design projects as they iterated. This in turn meant more visibility for each team.
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Customer Engagement
As Product Design teams grow they should establish layers of engagement with customers.
Engaging in partnership with Solutions and Support Teams. The first layer is about research to inform the design of a new feature (or product). This alone can present extreme challenges in partnering with Account Managers to identify users. It's a frequent cause for delays in Enterprise software. There are more ways to recruit for consumer research. In the Enterprise world creating user panels and a process to enroll users to sign up to participate appears to be the best - if not the only - path.
Engaging via company events. The next layer up looks at the end-to-end journey to understand the full context. Company events and customer round tables are a good conduit to engage with customers outside of a specific features. Not only does it help you understand their world, meeting other customers and collaborating on brainstorming issues and workflow is of great value to them.
At Demandware (now Salesforce Commerce Cloud) I worked with our Retail Solutions teams to add a "usability lab" in the bi-annual customer event we were holding in the US and in Europe. We took advantage of customers coming to congregate in one place. We also set up a UX Booth to get feedback on new features in progress. This proved to be a popular stopping point for customers curious to see what we were up and interested in influencing the product.
Team Engagement
UX runs on Empathy. Empathy starts with your team. Aside from being in touch with life-work balance challenges that vary from person to person, I have invested over the years time in clarifying – and at times designing from scratch – career ladders at various companies.
Clarity in career path is your compass. Clarity in career path is a critical component in scaling a team. A great part of coaching and mentoring is helping individuals reflect on their current role and the direction they want to take, how they want to grow or experiment. It helps managers assess how to structure their teams to support product roadmap. It also helps with retention.
Identifying the grid of skills critical to product design and to my team has also helped us feed questions to interview new candidates. Are we looking for junior designers our team can coach or more seasoned ones who will take on an entire product area? Is our team ready for independent researchers or do they all need to be generalists?