10 UXDERS, 10 QUESTIONS, 10 WEEKS

Week 9, Defining success: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

Published in

PatternFly

10 min readDec 1, 2021

Red Hat User Experience design spans many functions across the globe. Our experts share the key elements they look for in success.

The title card for this week’s question, “How do you define success working on a cross-functional and global team like UXD?” featuring headshots of all 10 contributors.

For our second-to-last question, we’re talking success. What makes UX work shine? What makes it impactful? Our UXDers discuss what success looks like to them as part of a cross-functional and global team, in their own roles and beyond.

How do you define success working on a cross-functional and global team like UXD?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

In a research operations role, success equals the completion of research. It’s something we’re working really hard on: getting the recruiting done, getting the right participants in for the study, getting them scheduled, making sure participants get compensated. It’s all taking care of the operations part, logistical part of the research. Taking that burden off the researcher, that’s the quick and easy success measurement — knowing everything was completed.

Another measure of success there for me is to expand a little bit outside of the research process itself. We want to be able to share those insights. Part of the operations role is to manage the tooling required for that, fostering a good community of users, a database of people we have that we can reach out to when we have research opportunities. A lot of it involves developing effective processes. From a research perspective, providing great insights, you can see where your recommendations and insights are getting implemented in products. Users are being heard, and so is your research team.

With cross-functional results sharing, we’re educating the rest of the business about UX and its value for research, for design. To me, understanding other groups’ roles is a very good measure of success because when you’re working on a cross-functional team, not understanding is a barrier. If you don’t, it’s tough to understand why they might be making a decision, or why they might be having an opposing opinion to yours. You don’t need to have all the technical knowledge that a developer has, but you should understand their persona and their goals. If we can educate people as to what our goals are, what our processes are, and what we do, it gives them the understanding of how we provide value. When we fully understand what other functions are doing, what their goals are, everybody can be happy. Everybody can work a little better together.

Beau: Principal UX Designer

I guess it is kind of what we’ve been talking about. Having that connection with the cross-functional team, you have that seat at a table, you are invited to the meetings. Another thing that is interesting that I see at a different level is trust in UX. It is this when something comes up in a product and a broader cross-functional team leans on UX for some level of input. Whether it’s can you do research for us, validate the direction we’re taking, can you mock up a couple of different designs, so we can look at different options together. When you get those requests, you have that seat at the table and you are participating at that level, I think that’s success.

You gotta have the relationships. To me, there’s nothing better than when you are on a cross-functional team and are contributing sort of early on through research, through expert evaluation, through early design. Honestly, doing a high-fidelity mockup once everything has been decided is great, but I feel you’re never going to get there, if you don’t do the other stuff. Somebody paved the way for doing that other stuff so we can have designers who work in PatternFly and actually just do these designs in PatternFly.

I think it’s different levels of success throughout Red Hat, I talked to different designers who struggle. There’s a designer who does reactive design, who comes in when there’s a problem. Versus let’s look at it from the beginning, and work together, and have this be a design lead process.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

I define success for us as when we’re able to release high-quality products with a level of consistency between them. Especially when they’re assigned to different designers, because that tells me how well we’re communicating, how well we’re sharing and adopting standards, and how well we’re even creating new standards that other teams adopt. On my team, I don’t see a lot of stagnation — people are getting a lot done. There’s a lot of productivity. People are always talking to one another, and trying to learn from one another. I see that as success. I shy away from measuring our success by how much revenue is being generated…there are too many factors outside of our control. I’m more interested in how well the team gets along. That’s really important to me.

Without putting metrics behind it, I want to see people grow. Seeing someone who came in fresh, hardly knowing anything, to then progressing where they are innovating/iterating on new patterns, or taking a leadership role on a cross-functional team is, to me, a great measure of success.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

I guess I have two responses. One is: There needs to be successful products that enable tomorrow, the next day, a year from now. There has to be some sort of business success.

The second is: At the end of the day, it’s about really liking working with the people I work with. In the end, we are working things out and at the end of the day we have a lot of good interactions with people, we like the people we work with, and we feel connected with people we work with whether they’re on our team or not. It doesn’t matter if someone works in a different country, we work out the timezones and have a successful meeting. For me, it’s all about the human connection, whether we’re working remotely or in the office.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

I think success is defined by people outside of the project caring about it. PatternFly is an interesting project because it’s not a product, so it doesn’t generate revenue for the company. It doesn’t have a direct stock; it doesn’t have a profit and loss statement or anything like that. I worked for a software development manager years ago, and I often quote what he said because it’s very true: “The measure of success in a software project is that you get to do version two of failed projects.” Getting enough to do new things and keep it, that means it’s successful. People are buying it, and people want more features. So that’s my take on one measure of success.

On the more personal level, what makes me feel good about a project? When people want to work together as a team and feel like what we’re doing is important, and that we’re accomplishing something that we feel good about. It’s all about the journey.

Joe: UX Developer

With UXD being cross functional, if a team anywhere within the Red Hat umbrella has a new project and their first thought is, “Let’s get UXD involved,” that’s a success. Or, “Let’s use Patternfly for our UI,” that’s also a success. Prior to PatternFly coming to existence, Red Hat provided applications that looked like they came from different companies altogether. Probably because some of them were different companies at one point. That’s not a good overall look for a global company. Because the applications that Red Hat distributes provide more continuity now than they used to, also shows a measurement of success.

Shiri: Senior User Experience Designer

On UXD, everything you do also relies on someone else: researchers, UX writers. We create success together. I think you can have small wins, and that you have a design that you’ve worked on for a long time that you pushed to get, and then it gets implemented. And you see the success of it eventually after a period of time, but it’s never only yours on this kind of a team. It’s a collaboration. So that’s one of the big differences from working on my own.

When I was alone, I was the researcher, I was the writer, I was the marketing person, I was everything. And I got to read it. And I was like, “Oh, wow, there are people that can do that for me and actual people that write text, and I don’t have to write everything.” I think that succeeding on UXD is never done on your own. It’s always collaborative, and it’s based on the user value that you provide. You never feel overlooked.

When I think of success in terms of UX, I just see a user that doesn’t have to think while they work on something. It’s fluid, and the usability is seamless.

Marie: Interaction Designer

Success is when everyone can bring a different perspective to the problem, work together, and still keep a consistent approach to deliver some innovation to a product. You have to communicate across teams and try to listen to everyone. And sometimes that’s really difficult. Sometimes someone else gets frustrated; sometimes you’ll get frustrated.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

I think PatternFly is the greatest thing we’ve ever done. It’s something that anyone can use, and I know there’s plenty of people on the team that aren’t involved in creating PatternFly at all, but are still able to consume it. And then for people who want to be more involved, they can write guidelines, things like that.

The PatternFly design share meetings are so helpful to see what else people are working on. I see a lot of conversations where two people find they’re tackling the same design problem, and then they can join forces and solve it together. The end result is better for everyone. I think as long as we all put in that slight bit of extra effort to talk to each other, we all benefit in the end.

Working on a global team takes more understanding. Lately, I’ve been working more with the UXD team in Beijing, and we’re 12–13 hours apart. So when I do leave comments on wireframes, I try to be thorough knowing that we’re not going to have that immediate back-and-forth real-time conversation about it, unless one of us wakes up early or stays up late.

Margot: Interaction Designer

Communication, and involving multiple different people in different issues, so that everyone’s in the know. It can be easy for one team to think something is obvious, and the other to be clueless and wonder why no one told them. So having an established flow of information between different teams is important, especially if whatever is being talked about will affect both of them.

Assuming good intent is such a big thing, too. We’re a global team, and people from different countries have different communication styles. For example, I work with our Czech developers and they talk so differently from an American. Very direct. And I like it. But I could see how other people may get offended or wonder why it wasn’t said in a more indirect way.

Being willing to give and receive feedback, both negative and positive, is essential for a team like ours. Good or bad, it will help solve problems later on, so it’s important not to be afraid to bring something up early on.