How We Standardized Our Design Workflow at Agoda
I still remember the time I just joined Agoda four years ago when our team was much smaller. Designers were all sitting in the same corner, and I was able to turn over and start a conversation with the team. As the organization grew bigger, we got more projects and teams to support the expansion.
Things we have to deal with in a larger group are more complicated than in a smaller one, and it can often result in a loss of transparency across teams. I am sure a lot of design teams like us have encountered similar situations.
To solve this, we tried to figure out how to improve our workflow and standardize our design process across teams. In this article, I would like to share some of our learnings about effective cross-team communication and collaboration, especially for complex projects involving multiple teams.
Why do we need a new workflow?
Over time, I started seeing issues crop up in my everyday design process. Speaking to other designers also made me realize that many shared my feelings about the current process, so I decided to figure out what was missing. At first, I tried to solve some of the problems from my end and later paired up with another designer to initiate this process improvement project.
We started with:
- Identifying some initial issues from our end
- Collecting feedback from cross-team designers through interviews
- Synthesizing ideas
- Drafting workflows
- Prioritizing unresolved pain points
After speaking with other designers in 1:1’s and observing the process across multiple teams, we started to see some pain points and patterns in different design stages. We identified issues before, during, and after the design process.
- Common pain points before designing
How can designers be aware if they are working on overlapping areas when sprint starts, understand the problem statements and goals, and leverage existing design components and research data in their designs? - During the design explorations
How can designers better collaborate, give feedback early and inform and align across teams along the way? - When designers finalize the design
How can we have a proper handoff design language and guidelines and ensure that designers are all aligned? - After designers hand off their work
How can we keep good track of the design implementation and follow up on the experiments?
As you see, we listed down pain points during interviews. There are many areas to improve, and as we can not do everything all at once, so we prioritized the essential points and tried to improve upon them.
What’s the outcome of this project?
We improved and standardized the overall design work process, and developed a working template which all designers across our teams can copy and use in their everyday work. At that time, our team was also migrating our tool from sketch, abstract, and Zeplin to Figma, so we tried to incorporate the process improvement with Figma.
The template is a Figma file that includes four pages: start, explore, handoff, and follow up. Each of them maps back with our standardized flow as below. We have specific checklists and guidance to remind designers what they should do at each stage.
The image below is an example of the checklist to remind designers at the “Start” phase. Designers should start with live design auditing and have conversations with design stakeholders. This way, we can prevent overlapping design tickets or misuse of design language at the early stage.
What are the challenges?
You might be curious about what kind of challenges we faced when carrying out this project. To be honest, the most challenging part was convincing the designers to adopt this flow. The design flow already exists in different teams and individual designers, having slightly different habits or ways.
As we know, it is difficult to change people’s behavior when they are used to it. However, since we were just about to roll out Figma to our entire design team, we decided to announce the new process and present it to the team as a part of Figma Week — a week dedicated to introduce our team to migrate all things on Figma. As all designers had to shift tools, we found this to be a golden opportunity to also adjust their ways of working. We demonstrated the standardized process step by step and helped designers understand the overall process by providing in-depth examples and details.
Other challenges came after we launched the project, mainly figuring out how to get the designers on board and familiar with the process. We spent time setting up templates to assist them and provided further explanations when designers reached out to us. We also set up an onboarding course for new joiners to adapt to this process.
The process is not fixed, and we have iterated on it since the initial launch. After a few months, we launched a survey to collect feedback from our designers and understand how we could refine and further improve the process.
After we got the feedback, we spent time analyzing it and identifying what we should improve in the next iteration. Overall feedback was positive, but there were some aspects we could streamline to speed up the process. For example, designers find it too time consuming to explain the project background, and also most of them don’t come back for the follow up checklist after they shift their designs.
Based on the feedback, We tried to simplify the steps and iterated another version to accommodate the needs, and we continue iterating the process to date.
In conclusion
As we kept observing this process and the changes it brought with it, we noticed increased collaboration and transparency.
For example, we saw designers informing and tagging each other in the early stage. They comment and get quick feedback through Figma files. We also see better collaboration between the product design team and the design system team. Even though it wasn’t applied 100% within the team, we saw some improvement.
This standardized design process helps designers follow the same workflow, improve work efficiency, and provide better collaboration and transparency across teams. I would encourage designers to examine your workflow and, if any pain points are identified, take the initiative to resolve them.
You might find it challenging to improve the entire flow, but it is easier than you think. Try to start small, solve the pain points from your end, or work with others who share similar ideas; it will eventually come along step by step.
Join the team
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