5 Ways Our UX Team Cultivates Cooperation
Take a peek behind the scenes of UX Design at Compass Digital Labs.
At CDL, we’re dedicated to radical collaboration across different expertise; it’s been shown that collaboration leads to increased engagement, morale, and efficacy at work. Today, we’d like to give props to a team that really embodies this part of our DNA.
In the past year, we’ve been building a team that leverages design strategically to differentiate our products and experiences. In the process, this team cultivated new approaches to design and innovation in product development. The combined experiences of our Researchers and Designers come from top organizations that practice design, ranging from Tech Startups, Shopify, McKinsey, IDEO, Frog Design, and Fjord.
Here are 5 reasons why our Designers & Researchers play a key part in our organization:
#1: They Aspire to Create Extraordinary Experiences for Users
In creating extraordinary user experiences in food hospitality, it’s important to first understand what our UX Design and Research team does at CDL. They partner closely with our Product and Engineering teams to define and design experiences that meet user needs and deliver on business goals.
As Summer Zhang, Product Design Lead, explains, “We focus on creating products and services that are contextually relevant to our business and operations, and more importantly, useful and meaningful to our end-users.”
For starters, it’s important to consider how our users respond to our designs. According to Janice de Jong, UX Research Lead, “Essentially, the team’s role is to give our users a voice during our product development process. Fundamentally, we need to understand their needs and the challenges they face in accomplishing their jobs-to-be-done in different situations.”
#2: They Proactively Catalyze Collaborations
Collaboration is an important part of approaching opportunities holistically from different expertise. It means proactively fostering a conducive environment to unify diverse skill sets to problem solve as one, throughout different stages of the product lifecycle.
The collaboration process, according to Christian Lisko, Product Design Lead, “[is] about how we can all make the best possible application, interpret the requirements, and really think through the features. It’s asking ourselves as many questions as we can to assess business and operational implications early. In the end, you really feel like you’re building something better together.”
“Every CDL team is aligned with our mission—support operators in creating great hospitality experiences through excellent digital products.” IHan Cheng, User Research Lead, explains. “Grounded with user insights and equipped with close collaboration with stakeholders, we can create solutions across the innovation spectrum, from short-term, incremental improvements to completely new ways to digitize our operations.”
#3: They Promote a Culture of Learning and Sharing
Truly, the desire to support their fellow team members is part of the fabric of our culture. To ensure everybody stays in the loop, there are scheduled recurring events to share updates and learnings with each other. There are feedback sessions where the team’s designers can present their work in front of “Fresh Eyes”; collaborative design jam sessions enable the team to lend new perspectives and suggest alternative solutions to each other’s work.
There are also sessions for talks on design philosophy and principles, as well as Lunch & Learns, where there is always an opportunity for anyone on the team to share their knowledge.
Of course, in terms of research, there’s plenty to learn from our end-users as well — which starts with understanding how they think. “We recognize the gap between what people say they will do and what they actually do.” Rebecca Judges, Sr. User Researcher, explains. “By leveraging a wealth of evidence from the field of behavioral science, we work to bridge that gap and support users in taking actions that help them reach their goals.”
#4: They Turn Little Nuances into Big Differences
In keeping an open mind, there are also lots of potential opportunities to discover the little things that make a large difference.
Summer recalls a recent project in which providing a bit of additional messaging offered a much friendlier experience;
“In certain moments, users can feel frustrated when they don’t understand the functionality or necessity of a particular feature. I believe attention to detail, such as clarity of intended experience, matters. People will trust your product and continue to use it.”
Going into further detail, IHan explains that “Our unique relationship to the business makes our solutions holistic; we are not just responding to a pain point, but we are also looking at improving the business processes to tackle that pain point at the root level.”
#5: They Infuse and Apply Design Thinking Throughout the Organization
In the world of UX Designers and Researchers, there are multiple ways to approach problems and, really, thinking itself.
“Design thinking is an integral part of product development — rather than starting with technology and its limitations, and figuring out what can we build, it’s about the ideal design and the ideal experience that we can provide to users.” Christian explains, “We can validate through research and testing, and then we can build.” Summer elaborates,
“We complement our Product Management teams to make the best product decisions to drive growth. We strive to design the best experiences that enhance the way our consumers and business operators interact with our digital products and services.”
If you want to learn more about how we’re driving the digital future in hospitality, we highly recommend that you follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also always visit our website.
BTW, did you know that our Technology Delivery Managers are magic? Here are 5 reasons why they’re wizards at what they do.
