New Year, Less Design Debt
By Sanjana Baldwa, Product Designer
design debt /dəˈzīn det/
noun: the product state defined by several incremental changes often lacking context, yielding a rapidly innovated upon, but somewhat disjointed user experience, incurred over time due to scaling and changing industry standards.
This is a big year for product design at CloudHealth Technologies — really big. We’re excited to get to work, and excited to tell you about it.
But first, here’s some context: CloudHealth Tech has its roots in engineering. This has profoundly shaped the company since Joe Kinsella founded it in 2013. Our product was built to be a comprehensive and detailed answer to a seemingly overwhelming and often complex question: how do I understand and optimize my cloud infrastructure?
These engineering roots are deep, and they have facilitated our exponential growth, preparing us to tackle any problem by churning out a solution… fast.
But the speed at which we operate, while speaking to the strength and agility of our teams, also leads to missed opportunities. We’re building and shipping in a vacuum of iteration, constantly striving for more features. We’re scratching the surface of every problem that comes our way, but chasing innovation into a deep hole lacking a holistic experience.
As a company that has been built on a strong engineering philosophy, we have found ourselves in what we at CHT call “design debt” — and as a leader in a high growth industry, this debt needs to be eliminated. We have a long way to go, but here’s where we’re starting in 2018.
“Always ready, never done” — building Elevate, our design system
The concept of a “design system” has become the talk of designers across all industries and companies — and with good reason. At CloudHealth Tech, we see it as an evolving and centralized style guide and resource library to accelerate product development and empower others to make consistent design decisions.
A concrete philosophy — curating a set of design principles
As we garner more and more voices and deliver more and more functionality, we need to make consistent and appropriate product decisions. The CloudHealth Design Principles are a set of digestible, unifying, and holistic elements that will serve as the foundation for creation as we grow.
Look out for a blog on this specific initiative next month!
Up our design IQ — facilitating design studios
One thing we pride ourselves on internally is our expertise. Every CHT employee understands our product extremely well, and therefore has valuable insight on what could make it better. We have capitalized on this in the past, but will continue to do so by hosting “design studios.” These are 90+ minute workshops inviting 5–7 participants (internal experts and oftentimes actual customers) that involve sketching, presenting, critiquing, and converging. The goal of a design studio is to throw away as many bad ideas as possible and leave with the strongest elements, while collaborating across departments to create the best possible solution.
Connect with others — getting involved in Boston’s design community
In a city like Boston, there are many companies that face similar design challenges, and it’s clear that there’s a lot to learn from one another. This year, we plan to host other designers in conversational and educational meet ups with the intent to better understand each others’ processes and see how different methods can be applied to different organizations.
We’re hosting the first of our meet-ups on March 8th from 6–8 PM with an organization called Ladies That UX (LTUX). This event will feature a panel of speakers that will share a few of their strategies for integrating UX in companies of differing sizes and levels of design maturity. Find more details here.
Increase our design influence — spreading the word
There’s obviously a lot to do here, and as we continue to grow, we need talented, motivated, and experienced individuals to help us push this design strategy through. This isn’t limited to newly hired designers, but also the architects and engineers responsible for building the product itself. Jared Spool said it best: “anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer.” Our goal is to empower the entire organization to adopt our design mindset such that we are not designing in isolation, but by working together as a whole.
We are excited to take the next step in finessing our product experience, and are grateful to have the opportunity to share our journey with you all. We encourage you to engage with us with questions and suggestions — here’s to 2018!
To view our current openings and learn more about CloudHealth Technologies, check out our Careers page.
Originally published at www.cloudhealthtech.com.
