Driving Product Teams To Become More Design Mature
As our organization’s user experience design leaders, our responsibility goes beyond the UX designers, researchers, and content professionals we work with. We’re also responsible for designs our organization’s product and service teams deliver. If we want to see those teams deliver better-designed products and services, we need them to attain the skills, knowledge, and experience to get there.
Most teams we work with aren’t ready to have full-time UX folks assigned to their projects.
as design leaders, our real job is readying those teams to deliver great designs at a more effective level. We must increase the design maturity of those product and service teams.
Stage 1: Dark Ages — The team is entirely focused on meeting the business and technology challenges, without considering the user’s experience at all.
Stage 2: Spot UX Design — An emerging design leader within the team struggles to deliver products and services with improved user experiences.
Stage 3: UX Design As A Service — Executive support to form and grow a centralized UX design team comes to the organization.
Stage 4: Embedded UX Design — Teams bring on their own UX design capability, separate from the centralized UX design team, to deliver enhanced user experiences.
Stage 5: Infused UX Design — Non-design members of the team have developed sufficient UX design expertise to, alongside the team’s UX designers, deliver market-leading user experiences.
Exposing team members to real users can often be a positive awakening. Seeing how users interact with their design helps them realize their decisions have consequences.
It’s important for the design leader to realize the team will transition on their own schedule. The best thing to do is to help those team members realize they’re making design decisions.
Arriving At Spot UX Design
One commonly effective technique at this stage is to restate the team’s business goals in terms of user experience goals
For organizations that haven’t formed a centralized UX design team yet, the next step is to rally executive support to make an investment in UX design.
Creating An Internal Design Agency
The UX Design As A Service stage begins when an executive invests in creating a centralized, internal design team. That team then supplies UX design resources to the product and service teams.
The biggest struggle at this stage for many design leaders is shifting from a reactive approach to design to a proactive approach
Ironically, a major milestone during the UX Design As A Service stage is when a product or service team becomes frustrated with the centralized design team.
Embedded Designers: A 24/7 Design Resource
The trickiest part of this stage is keeping any embedded UX professionals in the loop with the centralized team.
Infused UX: When Non-Designers Design
What triggers this final stage is when the non-designers on the team start making good quality UX design decisions.
Design leaders need to understand where a given team currently is in their journey. Using that information, they can tailor how they support the team.
It takes a long time to transition teams to the next level of maturity. Yet, when they do, the entire organization benefits.
Posted on August 22, 2019