How the first UX Designer of Goodpatch Berlin installed a UX driven culture

Goodpatch has been reinforcing the exchange between Tokyo office and Berlin office through past three years. This time, we had our very first UX Designer at Berlin office, Dorothée Schwartzmann as our guest at Tokyo office. She has given us a brief overview of her role as a UX Design Lead and how she has installed the UX driven culture in Goodpatch Berlin.

── Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Before I joined Goodpatch more than a year ago, I worked as UX designer in a brand strategy company in Berlin called Think Moto. It was a small company with about 10 employees. We helped our clients transform from analog to digital. Most of them were traditional companies and they didn’t know how they can transform their product to more high-end digital products. So we were thinking about the entire experience, not just of the copy or the colour of a button. The point was only to put the logo on the website, but to think about how the entire digital interaction would look like.

Before I worked at Think Moto for two and a half years, I was studying at the same university as Matthias and other colleagues at Goodpatch. I graduated with a Bachelors of Communication Design, focusing pretty much on conceptual and photography subjects. While I was studying there, we didn’t really have digital-focused classes. So it was only after my graduation that I got into the field of UX Design.

── Has your job title stayed the same after you joined Goodpatch?

No, I switched my title to Product Designer when I started working at Goodpatch Berlin. At that time, we were a really small team and the focus was on UI Design and not at all on UX. I was the first UX Designer, the one who did not focus on pixel perfect design and I was a bit afraid that the understanding of a UX Designer is building wireframes. That’s what I have done a lot before and now I wanted to work closer with the client and customers. Also in Tokyo there were already some colleagues with a similar Product Designer title, so it seemed the best title at that time.

── And since then, your title and role changed to UX Design Lead. Can you tell us the reason for that?

Yes. You talked about the Holacracy circle with Matthias, right? Boris is the CEO, and Matthias is the Design Lead. Because we grew so much, we needed to think of our internal structure and came to the conclusion that we need to split tasks a bit and would need one more Design Lead. So now Matthias is Design Lead and I’m UX Design Lead, if you want to be specific. We are still about to find out how we structure our team and responsibilities at the moment.

── It does sound like a pretty similar role to Design Strategist. Can you tell us the biggest difference between UX Design Lead and Design Strategist?

Yes, the role is pretty similar. I’m in between UX and Strategy. Maybe the proper name would be “UX Design Strategist”. Having “Lead” in the title only shows it’s a managing title as I have more responsibilities within Goodpatch Berlin and try to help grow the team.

── It is interesting to see that your current role has little to do with UI Design, where as you originally came from a UI related background.

I do originally came from the field of communication design which pretty much focuses on UI and visuals. However, I tended to take classes where I could focus more on concept or how we approach a problem. Discovering problems and understanding how people try to solve them always interested me. Next to my studies I was quite active in organising a student group and found myself more and more in charge of organizing or facilitating when it comes to teamwork. That is also why I found myself getting away from UI and more into a UX Design role.

When you are designing a product with a team, you would have a UX designer and Visual designer. The Visual designer will be sharp on a brand, primarily thinking about how the product will look like and what’s the visual system, where as the UX Designer will start with the content, users, business model and brand message. They combine those informations and e.g. create information architecture or navigation patterns.

Also very often UX Designer tend to take the role of managing in a team, because they are responsible to know the product best. They often facilitate workshops, but also have to manage different stakeholders and understand the business side of a company. That’s why they often get into project management, as they keep things together.

── When you joined Goodpatch, did you get the impression that it was a UI focused company and UX was missing?

When I joined Goodpatch last year the situation was a bit special, as I didn’t work in Berlin. I was hired in Berlin but I moved to Paris only one week later. I worked in Paris for the Renault-Nissan Alliance with Matthias and Felix who I luckily knew from university, so I didn’t feel totally strange there. I found my role in supporting the team with UX tools and approaches, such as wireframing or information architecture. But also developing our spot as design team in a new founded organisation.

It’s always the simple things and styles of working that are different when you join new teams. For example, wireframes here were already colored and that is not what I was familiar with. I used to work with wireframes in a very conceptual way as a tool to talk about concept and content. It was a UX Designer’s task to create these kind of monochromatic wireframes to help the client focus on the functionalities and not on colour gradients.

At Goodpatch, a wireframe was already like a first prototype. For me, wireframe is like pretty detailed sketch but eliminating colors in purpose of communicating with clients before moving into visual. Because when it’s colored, clients often tend to talk about colours and shapes instead of functionalities.

The methods such as structuring contents, knowing where the contents are from, and being aware of business, branding, marketing and user contents were something that Goodpatch was still discovering. The UX approach of Goodpatch was focusing on user testing, and there was not many awareness of other UX methodologies. So as coming from a brand strategy company I think I could definitely bring those elements and conceptual ways of working to Goodpatch and broaden our perspective here.

── How did you try to install a UX mindset to the team after joining?

There are several approaches I’ve taken. We have design review sessions every Friday at the Berlin office, and I always try to give some UX focused feedback. I try to give feedback which intrigues opportunities for the designers to think about in different kinds of situations such as logics and patterns, scaling navigation systems etc.

For example, when a designer designs a form for users to fill out, I always think about “What would the screen be like if a user typed the wrong information?” That’s a different use case. Even if users type something wrong, they still have to be aware of what’s happening there. I mean how often do you type your password wrong, right?
As a designer, you also need to be able to communicate with developers how the form will look like once the mouse is on, when it’s wrong or when it’s right. Designing form fields is such an annoying task for visual designers. There are so many cases to think of in terms of user experience.

When it comes to giving feedback, I think it’s always good to have a person who is super carring about how the product looks and really pushes to make it look super nice. But it’s also nice to have someone who can be the counterpart of this role and focus on the bigger picture, “This website looks super nice, did you consider that the button is way too big and tends to distract the original purpose of the website?”.

Design review sessions have now become more UX focused than before. We now not only talk about the size of the typography or the color of a button. I wouldn’t say I brought my workstyle into Goodpatch, more like complemented it.

── Can you tell us a bit more in detail about your role as UX Design Lead?

Currently I work with our partner NTT Data for a big german insurance company. The insurance field is moving at the moment as there are a few startups and disruptors popping up and traditional companies feel the pressure to innovate. It’s a very difficult field though because no user wants to deal with insurance. It’s that kind of obligatory thing that everyone has to do, but no one really wants to use these services and products. However, it’s a nice challenge for us to create a stressless user experience that might even surprise the user in a nice way.

In general these big corporates struggle with their digital transformation and we help them find their own way. In my role I coach the product teams by facilitating workshops, supporting hands-on during sprints and by establishing a design and user-driven mindset.

Very often big companies have that big concept paper but they don’t know what to do next or how the product should look like. We use our designathon format and other methodologies that suit the project to create a tangible product vision. Sometimes clients might say they already did some research, but you always have to check if they really tackled the right problem and ask many questions. At the same time, it’s important to appreciate their work and to find that right balance between what has been done and what should be done for the project.

The Designathon format is an awesome format to show our clients Goodpatch’s working style. We can prove that they can create something with lots of impact in such a short period of time, and we can show how powerful it is to work in an interdisciplinary team with such different mindsets. Within those different expertises, you can design a product that is easy and fun to use and the whole team stands behind it.

For one year now, Goodpatch Berlin has had a partnership with NTT Data and it’s nice to see our partnership grow and see how much impact we can have supporting big clients together. My work here has been going well. Boris was really happy about the work I’ve done and he even said “D doesn’t stand for Design but stands for Doro (laughs).”

── I heard that there is a lot of on site work happening in the Berlin office. What is the difficulty in working this way?

There are both good and bad sides to work at the clients office. So on one hand it’s crucial as you can establish a brilliant relationship with your client and build trust within the team you’re working with. We work at our client’s office for most of the week, which has been really effective for the project and for the communication with clients. There are less stressful moments with the clients because you can directly talk to each other everyday — don’t need milestones or have to prove yourself through monthly check-ins.

But this way of working also has its challenges we need to deal with. Most of us have family and would rather work remotely from the city they chose to live in. Or sometimes, it’s just the fact that designers chose to work in a design agency environment and not in that specific clients office. There are many, many reasons to prefer working in our office with our design colleagues.

That’s why every project team needs to find its own system to deal with this and to find the most convenient working style, as clients and situations there are different each time. From Goodpatch’s side we try to impose some basics though. For example we don’t put our members on projects at 100%. We have at least one day per week when we work on internal projects and are in the office. This is sometimes like a reunion in the office and it’s super nice. Also, we don’t staff projects with less than two members, so that we always have sparres or tandems and no one ends up being alone on the project or clients side. You have another member to exchange with and to get inspired by. Of course there are always exceptions and we need to reduce them as much as possible.

Next to this, we also focus to getting more clients in Berlin so members can work in Berlin for clients without getting bothered by travel as much as some have to now.

Originally published at Goodpatch Blog.