2018 for VMware Design
Looking back on 2018, the Year of Enterprise Design
Coauthored by Bonnie Zhang and Grace Noh
2018 Year in Review
Design made great strides in 2018. There were more conversations than ever about accessibility in design, greater effort towards bringing products to life through animation, and newfound global appreciation for UX thanks to a false ballistic missile alert.
How did we do?
Last year, we said that 2018 was the year of enterprise design. And it was, especially for VMware. In 2018, the VMware Design team set goals for moving enterprise design forward within VMware and beyond. By the end of the year, we saw many of these goals realized and witnessed how far we have come towards making design a driving force behind the company.
Statistically, we accomplished a lot — we conducted research with 1,500 of our users, engaged in 18 conferences, and nearly doubled the size of our design team. But beyond the numbers, we also made significant progress in major milestones we set last year. To evaluate how we did in 2018, we started by asking our design team what they thought was the #1 thing we accomplished as a team as well as what we could have done better.
We heard many different answers, but based on internal as well as external perspectives, here are the major highlights for VMware Design in 2018.
Becoming Experience-led
One of the biggest accomplishments in 2018 was moving the needle towards becoming an experience-led company. As an enterprise software company, VMware has come a long way shifting from being a product-led company to an experience-led one. We started telling stories and stopped pitching features. By the end of 2018, our leadership teams wanted to see more experience-led story-telling that weaves together different products and personas together, something that wasn’t done enough in the past.
This accomplishment is largely due to increasing internal exposure of our design team and hiring more designers. There are more designers to cover more product areas, planting awareness of design at the team level. We gained the respect of our leadership teams who began to appreciate and understand design in a whole new way. We continued pushing our design team brand at company-wide events, and became a sought-out presence at these events by the end of the year. All of these efforts stemmed from our 2018 goal to elevate and expand design within VMware.
As a result, we’re starting to see design become built into product processes, increased trust between designers and their PM and engineering counterparts, and proliferation of the idea that user experience should drive our products — not the other way around. Despite this progress, we recognize we need to continue promoting this experience-led mindset in 2019.
Creating a great design culture
Another accomplishment the team felt we achieved this year was acquiring great design talent. One of the main goals for the team in 2018 was to build the best design team and design culture, and we were able to make significant progress towards achieving this goal.
The first step the team did to approach hiring was to identify what our team was missing; we need people who are different from us. We collectively did a skills matrix exercise to determine what skills were important as a design team and which of those skills we needed more of. We also grew the leadership team (including a head of research and head of accessibility) to fit the needs of the team and filled out the management structure for the foundations of a strong design team. As the team expands, the culture continues to grow as well, with each new designer bringing their fresh perspectives and ideas to the table.
As we scale our team, finding the right processes and building a solid design infrastructure is important as well. We’ve heard that in the past year, with the implementation of DesignOps (including a design repository), the team has been more productive, more consistent across products, and more aligned with other products.
Of course, with a growing team, it’s also important to bond and have fun together. Check out a snippet of the fun from this past year below!
Increasing customer interaction
At the onset of 2018, we suffered from the age-old problem in the world of enterprise design of finding users to talk to. To address this, we started something called the Design Studio, a program that connects designers to customers on a regular and more frequent basis. Designers can hold casual conversations with users anytime about early designs, user frustrations, and feedback on what to improve.
The Design Studio originally came out of what we did at VMworld, VMware’s annual conference, where we held user research sessions with nearly 500 customers. Because of its success, we decided to continue the momentum with remote sessions. Over the course of the year while traveling the world to meet customers and attend conferences, we built up the user base for the Design Studio by gathering sign-ups for the program.
Now that we have a great framework to start with, we can continue talking to more users on a more frequent basis going into 2019. We want to get to a place where designers always have meetings with users scheduled on their calendars. Aside from the Design Studio, in 2018 we engaged with customers in other unique ways. On one occasion, we even flew out a customer from Ohio to participate with us in a Design Thinking workshop!
Sharing knowledge externally
The final goal we wanted to discuss from 2018 is elevating VMware Design externally. The VMware Design team strives to be part of the larger design community and is constantly looking for ways to contribute. One way we were able to do this in 2018 was starting this Medium blog. :) It’s given our designers a chance to showcase their work and their ideas and has helped many of our potential candidates get a better glimpse of VMware Design. Let us know if you have any comments on the content in the blog so far and how we can improve in the coming year!
We’ve also increased our involvement in external conferences this year. The team had a booth at SF Design Week and Enterprise UX, which gave us an opportunity to share our work and to connect with other designers in the industry. We also had our designers Chaunce 'Red' Dolan speak at UX Strat on how to improve product design with DesignOps and Peter Shepherd speak at UX Sofia on the keys to a great user experience.
What we could have done better
As 2018 came to a close, we also asked the team what was one thing we could have done better. The top response from the team is keeping the team connected and retaining a strong design team culture. We’re a diverse, worldwide team with designers in Bulgaria, Armenia, and India as well, and keeping remote teams connected is crucial. Now that we have more designers on more products, cross-team collaboration and making sure to align products has also become more important than ever.
We heard from some of the new designers that the onboarding experience could be improved, so we’re working on revamping that right now. With the team growing so quickly, we want each designer who joins to feel welcome and prepared with the resources to get up and running as soon as possible.
By reflecting on the past year and recognizing areas we can improve on, we can be better equipped to make those changes happen in 2019.
We look forward to 2019! 🎉
2018 has been an exciting year full of celebrations, realizations, and milestones. With that, we look forward to continuing this momentum in 2019! Look out for an upcoming article on what we hope to accomplish next year.
