An amazing milesone! {memo}

TL;DR

We’ve hit another major milestone! But also, make sure you’re using Sketch & InVision ONLY, and pace yourself with all attempts at being the (ux) Hero.

Onward & Forward

> “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill/

With each step each one of you takes, we’re making amazing progress with transforming our partners’ mind & hearts.

Living and breathing it day-by-day it’s easy to not think about where we are, and how far we’ve all come together — but I’m unbelievably excited and hope you all are too! Some of the largest hurdles we’ve overcome are behind us now.

This is the fruit of your sowing:

• ALL leaders have been constantly pushing back on (any seemingly random) hard dates!

• Each functional area is now currently empowered to prioritize proper time for problem discovery & design experiments!

• North Star concepts have been making great progress, and now everyone is trying to work together to get this type of experience in sooner than later!

• We’re in negotiations on adding a dedicated engineering resource to pair with the UX Ops team!

This is an amazing milestone!
… So, then what’s the next? Glad you asked! 😉

Our next milestone as a team is — Design Consistency!
… All done with the eye rolls? Okay, hear me out. I get it’s nothing new, nor surprising or anything that sounds revolutionary. However, what we can do is all agree on the common pains we’re attempting to solve:

Pains

• User confusion: Different patterns responsible for the same action confuse users

• Slow design process: The lack of using reusable design assets slows down UXers (as everything is being created from scratch)

• Slow development: The low number of fully reusable components bogs down Engineers

• Difficult onboarding: Introducing new UXers, PMs, and Engineers to an undocumented “ design system” is difficult

Why is this so important?

First, it may be good to review some of the common concerns some of you may have used:

• “It’s stifling my creativity”

• “My research validates this design I just made”

• “The UI assets aren’t available in the tool I’m using”

• “It’ll take me too long to figure out what’s in the UI library.. I’m faster if I just recreate everything”

• “…. I’m not sure why it was structured that way, but this way would be much better”

These are all good individual points. In regards to an individual UXer. Working on an individual team.
But that’s the crux, this isn’t about individualism. There are currently 14 UXers working specifically within {this portfoilo} team. There are other UXers working on products outside of our team. There are more teams out there working on products that don’t have UXers.

A solution that has had success for you or others as a single UXer can not work with 14+ of us.

We have to ask ourselves, just because this makes /me/ faster, are there any longterm pains the team may face?
I know this is a hard problem to solve. It’s not going to be easy, but it absolutely doesn’t mean it can’t be fun or has to be stifling. Just different.

As a reminder, to gain design consistency we’ll need a healthy {portfolio} Design System — not just UI elements:

A mature design system has:

• Rules

  • Principals

  • Do’s & Dont’s

  • Guidelines

  • Interaction

  • Content structure

  • Copy tone

• Design Scaffolding

  • Approved Fonts

  • Iconography

  • Grid dimensions

  • Color schemes

  • Page Flow

  • Adaptive and/or responsive definitions

• UI Patterns*

  • Individual elements

  • Core components

  • Modules / blocks

{uxer j}, {uxer w}, and {uxer n} have been cooking up some amazing things helping us get the momentum going. This is just an acknowledgment to celebrate how far we’ve come, and how important it is for all of us to ensure we’re all helping move onward & forward to the next milestone!

3 ways to immediately ensure we’re moving forward

1. Stop using any design tools that aren’t Sketch or InVision for primary design work

2. Ensure you’re utilizing our full UX pipeline of processes before allowing concepts to be pushed to production. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

   • Peer Reviews

   • Design Crit

   • Pattern Alignments

   • Lab usability Tests

3. Continuing to experiment with research, design, and usability tools to push and stretch our current processes — /just not as the main tool/