EXPERIENCE GUIDELINES

BUILDING A CONSISTENT DESIGN SYSTEM

MY ROLE

I was lead on the EXPERIENCE GUIDELINE project. It was my responsibility to define the need, requirements and budget. We knew that we needed an agency to partner with, one that could provide an unbiased opinion on our current implementations and systems. Working with such an agency would enable us to get the honest feedback the project needed to be successful. I was accountable for holding the agency true to that goal.

SITUATION

Because of lightning fast growth and aggressive product launches, keeping pace with a consistent UX framework became a huge challenge. We recognized the need to establish a Guideline that would establish a baseline framework that our team could then quickly implement, adjust and build on.

TASKS

Find agency to work with on the project
Gain Executive approval for project and budget
Define scope and requirements of project
Conduct an audit of UX/UI systems across platforms
Provide suggestions on unifying the misaligned system pieces
Create a Guideline that standardized the UX framework across platforms

ACTIONS

This project had a very aggressive 6-week schedule to, understand, audit, and make recommendations on 3 different product platforms with the goal of unifying UX and UI. As lead on this project, I had to take actions to course correct or redefine objectives during this project with the acceptance of our leadership and team.

The agency team held back on their assessment of the systems. They presented findings to our Sr. Director that had a less than a positive effect. We perceived their report as what we wanted to hear not what we needed to hear. I adjusted this by having a meeting with the agency and letting them know exactly what the team and myself were thinking. We needed brutal honesty; we needed to know where we succeeded and where we failed.
After the first few weeks and diving deep into the audit of the UX/UI systems, I had to make a tough decision. I saw the value of the audit and what our team could learn from it, but were running short on time for a polished guideline that would have been executed on that audit. So I decided to make the Audit the priority and to have the agency provide loose recommendations based on the audit. I also had them create a template for the Guideline that we could easily adjust and publish.

To accomplish this new priority I setup “deep dive” sessions with the Agency and UX Leads for each platform. It was important to able to coordinate this level of detail so the agency could understand each platform independently and access holistically the differences or misalignment.

I also took a couple of our leads and the agency out for a product experience day. This way they got hands-on use of the actual products and the entire experience that we where delivering.

RESULT

Although the initial scope and purpose had changed for this project, it was still successful in these ways.

It gave our team perspective on how independently we were operating and made it very obvious that core framework pieces needed alignment.
The project helped boost collaboration between our team members.
We did not receive a final Guideline from the agency, but the recommendations we did receive inspired team members to form a team to create our version of the Guidelines. I was more than willing to lead a team and give them the responsibility in creating the final Guideline.
We ended up with a .5 version of this Guideline. It was decided that we as a team needed to agree on our UX Principles and an effort to solidify this was begun.