design leadership
design guide & Playbook
In a world where so much is packaged and automated, it is tempting to thing that Design itself can be bottled and indiscriminately handed out to anyone and everyone and….*POOF*…good designs get pooped out the other end.
design still requires designers
This idea may be uncomfortable for some of you, but design is more than the sum of its components. It required skilled professionals, much like QA and development do. Don’t assume that because someone bought you some brushes and some paints that you will be recreating the Sistine Chapel ceiling and time soon.
It is not unusual for large companies to grow through acquisition alongside organic growth. This can create a wanky and heterogeneous portfolio of products that does not hang together or communicate a brand. It also has a cost for end users, in terms of having to learn different expressions of workflows and inefficiencies due to poor integration.
Project Objectives
Create a set of design guidelines that will create a consistent set of re-usable components that will allow designers to share a common set of practices and principles…and ultimately yield a product portfolio that looks like it was create by one single company.
Also, create a playbook for integrating processes, practices, and integration milestones.
My Contributions
I help coordinate early thought leadership, participated in early concept generation and roadmaps. I later went on to own the facilitation of the global effort and I wrote the lion’s share of the guides content, organized a community around usage, and wrote the original manifesto and set of guiding principles.
I also wrote the original UX Playbook for my department, further integrating practices and processes.
my process
MISSION
Just like a traceability matrix used for requirements and design specifications, all parts of the Design Guide need to be able to trace back to the company’s mission in some meaningful way. As such, the first step in my process is making sure all elements build on a deep understanding of what the company does and why they do it. This will help shape and prioritize later artifacts.
The example that I am citing for this page comes from Fresenius Medical Care. The Mission Statement at the root of this work can be seen above. You can learn more about Fresenius Medical Care by clicking on the image.
02
MANIFESTO & PRINCIPLES
The next step is to write your Manifesto & Principles. The Manifesto is a statement of beliefs that is shaped around the context of the company mission and how it can be expressed through the design of its products.
The Principles build on the Manifesto and create an actionable list of value propositions that can act as guardrails for the development of design elements.
Both the Manifesto and the Principles should be written as a collaborative effort between the designers and stakeholders to assure ownership and buy-in. Here, we used the HEX-Works community to craft everything.
Examples of Principles that I facilitated the creation of include:
1. Put the User First – this is a statement about the importance of research as a must-have in the design process.
2. Make Things that are Accessible and Inclusive – this builds off the company Mission and assures that the needs of our end-users are included and that multiple perspective are captured.
3. Design for Safety and Sustainability – this is a recognition that corners cannot be cut and that there are responsibilities inherent in the act of designing something.
4. Deliver Unexpected Awesomeness – one of my favorites. This is the acknowledgment that if innovation and progression is to happen in design, you have to look beyond the requirements to broader needs that were inferred rather than articulated
DIFFERENTIATING THE NEEDS OF RESEARCH & DESIGN
For steps 3 to 5, it is important to recognize that research and design have different needs and therefore different there need to be elements to this constellation of materials that speak to each. I split them out below.
RESEARCH
design
03r
MILESTONES
Because the whole of UX really revolves around research and the expression of understanding the users. Many of the research milestones and deliverables are also represented in the Paratrooper Design process.
The important thing to remember here is that these research milestones need to be agreed to and documented prior to a project starting. Do not expect and time for new research once the train is moving. You won’t make any friends by suggesting you need to delay a release so you can learn more about the users.
03d
FOUNDATIONS
Understanding how brand is expressed in the Design Guide is super important. While these decisions may not be owned by designers, they certainly need to be interpreted by designers.
In the Foundations, you need to include functional pieces around color, typography, any definitions about what “good design” means to the group, and everything else that would be considered universal across all product designs.
I also built several tools, including a color calculator and a minimum font size calculator (both based on best practices of industry and accessibility standards), to aid designers in more nuanced design decisions.
04r
INTEGRATION POINTS
It is important to understand not only what your milestones are, but also how to bootstrap when into an existing SDLC.
Many companies are now using AGILE, which actually integrates reasonably well with UX research milestones. I’ve found that the usability research needs that are part of an intra-sprint design cycle, are best served using the “sprint ahead” approach…but that may not be the best approach in all situations.
04d
COMPONENTS
With all of the other precursors in-place, now it is time to have a full/comprehensive definition of what all the pieces look like. This is an important first step toward making the bridge over to the development team.
It is also important to use this as an intermediate step to something like design tokens. For this part of the process, I like to use an inheritance model for coordinating the visual representation of design elements, and use it as guidence for elements that do not exist yet (I’m happy to talk more about this if you are curious).
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TEMPLATES
Having set of research standards, and the supporting templates, is a great way to keep all UX research in sync. There are a lot of good resources available out there, so, no reason to re-write the book. Some of the better ones I’ve seen also include some basic training to make sure everyone understands the tools and there is consistancy in terms of how data is collected.
05d
TOKENS
The last leg of the race is have some set of reusable design tokens, or other repository of reusable code. This serves as a bridge between design and development and assures that designs derived from user research are represented correctly.
TAKE AWAY
I will end with the same warning I started with. Just because you have reusable code chunks doesn’t mean you can cut designers out of the process. They are an indespensible part of the puzzle and play a critical role in product development and delivery. Having the pieces I’ve outlined above in your back pocket will go a long way in assuring a consistant product portfolio.
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I welcome any feedback comments or questions about any work you find on this site. I am also always interested in exploring new opportunities and new ideas.