Design’s Role in Digital Transformation
My journey implementing design transformation for an enterprise client in Dubai By Eman Faiz, Senior Product Designer, TribalScale
Providing a valid solution to a problem is how design can contribute to generating profit. We cannot fully understand problems faced by potential or existing customers if we do not leverage emotion and practice empathy. We are only human and that means that we don’t always make the most rational decisions. Emotion, habits, and fear of the unknown can strongly influence our decisions when interacting with both physical and digital products. How can we tap into our emotional intelligence to ensure that this customer buys my chair to sit on, and not another perfectly designed chair? Part of a designer’s job is to practice daily empathy, especially when designing digital solutions. When timelines and scopes get stretched, the risk of losing sight of real unmet user needs increases. It is the designers’ responsibility to reel the team back in and remind them that their goal is to solve for the human at the other end of the product.
Let’s shift perspective and talk about the design process of creating these solutions.
Transformation at an enterprise level can be very overwhelming and many times the role of design strategy is overlooked or not given enough importance. Common factors I have noticed boil down to the misunderstanding of design processes, the inability to apply it into existing working environments, and the lack of tracking design deliverables for improvement and productivity. By empowering design teams to practice an established and structured design process, not only does the quality of the work improve, but so does the well-being of your design team. You may find yourself praising the emotional capacity of your designers instead of using it against them.
Transformation in Dubai
I had the incredible opportunity to introduce and help implement a design transformation for an enterprise client during a secondment in Dubai. New place, new culture, new teams, and yet very similar challenges. Digital transformation is a massive endeavor in which design can and should play a very influential role. Our client was a marine cargo handling company, with ports and terminals all over the word handling trade and logistics. Their vision was to improve the operational aspect of cargo logistics and to provide communication with their global customer base through a seamless experience. This vision translated to a suite of digital products targeted for a variety of logistical processes as well as an array of end-users. As you can imagine, with global cargo logistics come a variety of different roles from financing teams, drivers, ship crews, terminal staff, customer teams, IT teams, and this is not an exhaustive list.
So where did we start?
I worked alongside an extremely talented product designer, Bevin Mohabeer, to introduce three design transformation initiatives. The first opportunity evident to both Bevin and I was the need for consistency in visual language and usable patterns to be applied to multiple applications. We implemented this by introducing a design system. This suite of products already existed to an extent, which meant there were already teams set up to build, maintain, and evolve the products. We identified very early on that a design process was lacking and resulting in an inefficient use of resources. Our solution was to translate a design process into JIRA tasks to blend nicely into an existing workflow.
Lastly, the requirements handed to design teams were not always validated and therefore changed on a daily basis. This led to countless cycles of interface designs with features and capabilities changing at a whim. To solve this, we introduced design thinking workshops. The goal was to help align the teams and leverage perspectives and expertise from strategy, technology, and design earlier on in the product development cycle.
After spending a week interviewing finance teams at the Caucedo terminals in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, I flew to Dubai to meet the rest of the team and get started on the project. I was introduced to a highly skilled but remote design team in India that we would work closely with to achieve this design transformation.
1. Design Tool — The System
With so much to accomplish, Bevin and I did not want to recreate the wheel. In other words, we did not plan to create a design system from scratch but leverage components, behaviours, and patterns that have been widely adopted and proven to have high usability. We made the decision to leverage material design into the net new products that were yet to be designed and eventually built. As we were working closely with remote teams, we used Figma to start flushing out the system and eventually switched to Zero-Height for more accurate documentation and development hand-off. We did our due diligence to communicate the value of using a design system to ensure we had the full support and trust of our client.
Not only do design systems provide consistent experiences and improve usability for end users, it also allows flexibility in applying multiple client branding to the applications. This consistent use of components also translates to the engineers to help build the products more efficiently without having to hardcode every unique scenario. The best part, in my opinion, is how the design system encourages and highlights the effectiveness of clear communication between designers and engineers.
2. Design Process — JIRA tasks for Design
The introduction of the design system led to a whole new set of meetings, discussions, and additional workload. Bevin and I had to carefully navigate existing sprints and requirements to find opportunities to enable this additional work and complement this existing workflow. We began to define a structured design process that would begin to document a linear order of design tasks, that loop when necessary, and track the amount of time for each task.
The process began with understanding current state and defining requirements. These tasks included meetings with clients and product managers, reading documentation, and creating journey maps. We then introduced timeboxed tasks for design exploration that would lead into internal design team critiques. These tasks gave the designers the creative freedom to explore layout and form a design rationale behind every design decision that is made when designing screens and flows, and to start leveraging components from the design system correctly.
By conducting these explorations and internal critiques, we were confident to present our recommended designs to our clients in external critiques. By tracking these internal and external critiques, it became more apparent how much time it takes to continuously reiterate. This highlighted the need to prioritize and justify each iteration. Once the designs had survived the critiques and earned the badge of approval, we introduced tasks that would ensure correct hand-off criteria for engineers to start building. The last element of our process was to conduct design quality assurance tasks to ensure the built product reflects the design accurately. Our burndown charts were definitely not impressive for the first couple sprints. However, the learning curve was not overly difficult and soon enough we not only began to see a burndown chart that reflected the efficiency of this process, but the quality of the design and focus of the iterations began to improve as well.
3. Methodology — Design Thinking Workshops
As much as the JIRA tasks brought order to the design team, we noticed that requirements would be changing considerably. These continuous changes would prevent the designs from getting handed off to our engineers to start building and therefore slow down the project’s timeline. We saw the opportunity to conduct workshops and introduce design thinking methodology to help the wider teams align on their product goals and prioritize feature sets that required building. The beauty of the design thinking methodology is that it brings equal importance to the viability, feasibility, and desirability of the solution.
So what does that mean? Well, we encouraged having at least one representative from each discipline (product, engineering, and design) to influence and contribute to the prioritized features for build. By the end of running these workshops and targeted exercises, designers and engineers got a clear direction that everyone agreed upon. It also forces the need for clear justification when pivoting on an aligned strategy and adjusting the product roadmap. Now with more context, designers and engineers could then collaborate on the UX infrastructure of the existing or net new application before blindly diving into designing user interfaces.
Another highlight of these workshops is that they truly invite opportunities to come up with innovative solutions. After running a full Discovery for one of the products, I realized that in order to run a workshop week for multiple projects, these discoveries can only provide value when scheduled well in advance with leadership and a can-do mentality.
We were able to introduce design thinking methodologies to our client and ultimately illustrate how design can influence the full product development cycle. I have no doubt that there may be flaws in our approach and that there are opportunities to improve this design transformation. Needless to say, we faced many challenges alongside successes when introducing these pillars while ensuring the teams were set up and comfortable to use these new methods and tools. That being said, the progress I saw in the four months of my secondment was extremely fulfilling and I am excited to apply everything I learned to my future engagements.
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Eman is a senior product designer at TribalScale with 4 years experience in Discovery processes. She has spent her time developing and implementing design thinking methodology to create client centric strategies and experiences for enterprise digital transformation. She is now helping define and bridge the gap between discovery and delivery for the services industry. Eman collaborates with technology and strategy teams to design and deliver digital solutions and products while practicing enterprise design thinking processes, lean & agile methodologies, UX research, and strategic development.
TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!
