Why Everyone Should Add Designers to Their Organizations
Blueprint is tripling the size of our design team. Why?
Two semesters ago, this phrase graced Blueprint’s Medium blog, titling an article introducing Blueprint’s plan to add one designer for each of our project teams. This article debuted months of work poured into our design expansion: starting with Jemma Kwak’s (Spring 2019 product design director) vision-driven proposal, advice from Queenie Wu and Carly Stanisic from Blueprint’s Waterloo chapter, and many meetings over the summer with Rachel He (Spring 2019 — Fall 2019 marketing design director, Spring 2020 VP external), Cathleen Jia (Spring 2019 developer), Spring Ma (Fall 2019 VP external), and me.
Over the last two semesters, I’ve worked with our first cohort of designers as VP Design for Blueprint, and observed firsthand the impacts our designers have had on our club. With our projects now wrapping up and teams preparing for handoff to their respective non-profit organizations (NPOs), I thought it’d be a good time to reflect on these observations, and why everyone should be adding designers to their organizations. Additionally, our designers will be posting their own in-depth case studies about their NPO work to give you a glimpse of what it looks like on a project-level, so keep an eye out for that 👀.
Blueprint, pre-design expansion
To understand how the design expansion has changed Blueprint, we need to give color to how Blueprint was beforehand. Blueprint’s project teams were composed solely of developers, and when in need of wireframes, one or two developers on each team would become ad-hoc designers and create wireframes on Figma. Occasionally Blueprint would have developers with previous design experience, and the role would be tasked to them; however, the result of this was that the work often didn’t line up with what they had signed up for.
Aside from these developers, the design team primarily composed of 1–2 design directors, who would advise design work across all teams. With five projects each year, tight timelines, and developer-oriented teams, design-thinking was often an afterthought. Teams didn’t conduct user research, and many of the design decisions were based on a rudimentary understanding of the NPO’s problem. Like a game of telephone, information would be passed from the NPO to the team’s project leader, and then filtered through the mental models of developers before a solution to the perceived problem was built.
We realized that if we want to create sustainable and impactful projects (in the spirit of one of our core values, “Mission first”), we need to ensure that our projects are well-designed to solve problems for the intended users; thus, the design expansion was brought to life.
Three things (out of many) designers have brought
The impacts designers have had on Blueprint are, in my opinion, innumerable, but for the sake and brevity of this article, here are three of them:
1. Better projects for the ones that matter: the users
Blueprint members don’t often fall into our projects’ targeted demographic, and thus user research is essential to realizing the most effective and impactful solution for the intended users. There have been multiple instances where our user research has impacted the trajectory of our projects, which wouldn’t have happened previously without time dedicated to understanding the mental model and workings of the intended audience.
Two examples of such this semester are DC Central Kitchen and People Power Solar Cooperative. DC Central Kitchen shifted away from building a recipe database after realizing that the lack of healthy eating within low-income communities was not due to knowledge gaps in how to make healthy dishes, but rather a perception that produce at corner stores — often the only accessible option in these grocery store deserts — were expensive.
People Power Solar Cooperative decided to emphasize community announcements and gatherings instead of financial returns in their portal, after user interviews showed that participants in the cooperative were highly motivated by the sense of community over finances.
These decisions add to the impact and longevity of our projects, making our products better address the problems the NPOs are trying to solve, and wouldn’t have been possible without investing time into user research. It reminds us that what’s best for the project is not necessarily what Blueprint members, or even the NPO, may initially think to be the best solution.
2. Closer partnerships with our NPOs
Our designers had weekly to bi-weekly calls with our NPOs to conduct user research, provide updates with wireframes, and get feedback through user testing. By doing this, we were able to get earlier input about what parts of our projects worked or needed fixing by presenting wireframes and prototypes to our NPOs, and our NPOs were able to provide that feedback and see how the product progress developed over time.
With working prototypes as early as week four of project work, our NPOs were able to see their visions develop early on and became more invested our partnership. This tighter feedback loop has also helped us avoid scenarios that have happened in the past where large parts of the project with hours of development work have been scrapped or changed.
By solving problems alongside the NPO through frequent design updates and feedback sessions, Blueprint has become less of a contractor and more of a partner, bringing our club closer to both their mission and our own.
3. More inspired and effective developers
By having a dedicated designer per team, we were able to focus on design processes and research thoroughly instead of rushing developers to complete wireframes before starting development work. The tandem nature of having a dedicated designer alongside developers has made teams more efficient: as wireframes became concrete goals of what to look forward to upon completion, developers became more motivated to do their sprint tasks and reach that finish line.
Our designers’ polished and fleshed-out wireframes have also sparked conversations within Blueprint about frontend practices (from use cases for different CSS units to mapping components in wireframes to React components for well-written and reusable code) — conversations that are often missing in a computer theory-oriented academic environment. Additionally, Blueprint is blessed with superstar designers who aren’t afraid to jump into code themselves and get their hands dirty ensuring that the actual product is a mirror image of what they’ve designed.
Designers have increased the quality of our projects, and we’re all for it. They’ve brought Blueprint’s focus back to building things that are actually catering to users’ needs while bringing valuable design perspective to the rest of the club. These changes, combined with the multitudes that didn’t make it to this article, translate into longer-lasting and more sustainable products that better support our NPOs’ missions.
Wrapping it all up
Every organization that builds tech should include more design processes, if not a dedicated designer, for each of their projects. Especially at Berkeley — where there are so many project-based organizations and a growing design community streaming into product design roles — organizations should be diving into this symbiotic opportunity to have designers gain experience, work their magic, and make better products. Another organization that’s been building their design team is BerkeleyTime, led by Jemma Kwak herself, and we hope that more organizations follow suit.
If you’re a mission-driven designer at Berkeley who believes in building solutions for non-profits, we hope that this article has given you insight into Blueprint and piqued your interest in applying in future semesters (we’ll be looking for designers this coming Fall!).
If you’re an NPO looking into partnering with Blueprint, we hope this article has given you insight into our design-driven processes, dedication to quality, and how we might benefit your own operations and missions.
None of this would have been possible without our superstar designers who are empathetic, have fun, raise each other up, critique and take critique, and so much more. If you’re interested in working with them, you can find them here:
- Ace Chen (Fall 2019 RLC, Spring 2020 DC Central Kitchen)
- Annie Wang (Fall 2019 DC Central Kitchen)
- Annie Zheng (Fall 2019 — Spring 2020 1951 Coffee)
- Iris Hou (Fall 2019 — Spring 2020 People Power Solar Cooperative)
- Joelene Latief (Fall 2019 — Spring 2020 Unloop)
Thanks for reading! Keep an eye out for more posts on Blueprint’s Medium from our designers themselves with in-depth glimpses into the work they’ve done at Blueprint, and here’s to always improving our club through design!
