For the Love of UX!

By Sanjana Baldwa, Product Designer

Just a couple weeks ago, the CloudHealth product design team, in collaboration with Ladies That UX: Boston, hosted over 50 designers in a panel-style meetup titled “Design Evolution: Promoting & Integrating UX & Design in Your Organization.”

Facilitated by our very own Cheryl Gillis, the panel consisted of three women from corporations with large, evolved UX teams to startups with only a few UXers, all of whom spoke to the challenges, strategies and methods in growing a design-driven culture.

The discussion brought forth some very interesting strategies in getting organizations behind UX team efforts. Here are some that we found especially applicable to our work at CloudHealth Technologies.

Get thee a design system

Our panelists agreed on this point: investing in design really early is key to any product’s success. “It’ll initially feel very much like a Frankenstein — just something we have to bear with to move this thing along,” said Jackie Smith, of Athenahealth.

Creating a standardized, regulated library of components is a big investment upfront. The task itself requires buy-in from a product’s front-end team to ensure alignment, and thorough documentation to ensure quality.

For smaller design teams, where the teams needed to own the implementation, documentation was key. For a larger design team, setting up a specific team consisting of a UX designer and front end developer mandated to oversee the adoption process and the ongoing evolution/addition of new components and patterns proved to be highly effective.

Jackie talked about how Athenahealth has been through several design systems in the past. “It takes time to get it right and to get everyone on board,” she said. “But it’s worth it.”

Personify your users

Designating personas is a concrete way to ensure that all teams across the organization are familiar with the goals and pains of their users. “We have personas that we created based on 600 surveys that our customers answered,” said Jen McGinn, of CA Technologies. “Those personas are used throughout the sales, marketing, support, development, and UX departments.”

While personas are great at keeping your organization focused on the user and qualitative evaluation, they can’t always offer insight into how your product’s design is performing. This led to the next strategy for measuring success…

Get quantitative with it

Using quantitative engagement data can often help highlight the success or failure of a feature or design. All panelists mentioned how collecting before and after metrics, such as time on task or clicks necessary, can make a large case for the value of her team’s work.

“We now go in front of our larger audiences and determine if we need to look at an area of the product if it was performing at this level or had this heuristic score or this NPS,” Jackie said. “If we’re able to increase it here by adding design — it gives that number to show value.”

Dedicate time to the process

In a high-intensity production cycle, key steps in the design process can be undercooked or entirely overlooked. Design is sequential and often highly iterative, and skipping steps because of the time added to the production workflow could end up hurting the end product.

A way to circumvent this is to involve the company throughout the process. Panelists found success by mapping the design process to the development process, for example: adding design stories to core development team backlogs or requiring design sign off before deployment.

“I think it’s important to have a design culture where people can come to you — as an engineer or customer support — and say ‘hey, this doesn’t make sense,” said Elyse Bogacz, of Drift. “We want to be able to point to the value of the systems we’ve put in place so we aren’t forgetting that [a consistent process] is how we’re going to do things to make sure our users have a consistent experience.”

Repeat after me: we are all “UX”

This discussion yielded some valuable insights and strategies for bringing companies to the next level of maturity as design driven organizations.

Jen emphasized the stake the full company has in solving the right user pains: “As our net promoter score rises, so does revenue. Therefore, the user’s pain is now a sales pain. Tying that in has helped us understand the importance of customer satisfaction.”

Jackie agreed. “You want to get to a point where, if we’re in a meeting, and UX isn’t there, an engineer can stand up and explain why we made certain choices, why we chose the path that we did, and why this is going to help the user,” she said. “It makes me proud to know that the whole team is invested and believes in what they’re doing.”

Special thanks to our three panelists, and Ladies that UX: Boston for the great success of our event.

Learn more about what the product design team has planned for this year at CloudHealth Technologies.

Originally published at www.cloudhealthtech.com.