UX-strategy in practice: a report by Yuri Vetrov on UXPeople
Report by Yuri Vetrov from the UXPeople conference.
Hello everyone, my name is Yuri Vetrov (@jvetrov), from the company Mail.ru. Today I will talk about UX-strategy. UX-strategy - it is a kind of necessity, which is long overdue in design. Previously, the design was something of a means for solving basic problems, but today it is becoming more important for products, much more critical, penetrating to the level of “product management”. I will tell you what it is in my vision, as it happens in Mail.ru, and I will try to explain where we are going in general, and in Mail.ru, and, as it seems to me, in the profession.
Presentation of the report: www.slideshare.net/jvetrau/ux-people2013-yvetrovuxstrategy
Full video: uxpeople.ru/video
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In the ideal world, products are designed at the very start, immediately everything is done in accordance with the ideal processes. However, in life everything is somewhat wrong - at the start of the product it is much more important to prove that it actually exists as a product. It is more important to raise the audience, apply the concept to find your niche, your approach. It happens, by the way, that there is no money at all - a startup has some kind of minimal budget that is spent on the most critical one. Therefore, there is no time left for design. If we take well-known brands as an example, the first version of Windows in 1985 looked like this, was not understood by users or the market, and as a result sold less than 500 thousand copies. Now they have 90% of the market and space runs.
Or if we take Android - when they started, in 2007, everyone scoffed at them. In 2009, they had less than 2%, and again, everyone mocked them. Now everyone knows where they are. Why it happens? Because at the start of the company, profit growth and audience growth are much more important than the quality of the product, much more important than how it is made in terms of the quality of the technical implementation and the quality of the design. It is necessary first to prove that a product basically has the right to exist in the market. Then comes the understanding that design is important. The reasons for this may be different. For example, competitors have intensified, who are doing well with the design, or there is a negative public opinion about the product, or there is a bad feedback from the user, or the user outflow begins, or it just becomes fashionable to design. And at this moment the company moves from aggressive accumulation of the user base to its retention.
In the experience of Mail.ru, it has about 40 products, many of them have tablet and mobile versions, a total of 200 projects. In our division there are about 20. For all products, the monthly audience is over 100 million users. All this ultimately imposes its own limitations - it is dangerous to change something too dramatically and you need to think ten times before you do something.
I share the three levels of UX maturity based on our experience and that of many other companies. The first level is operational , the design team in this case solves the problem of creating artifacts. For an example - the designers are told to create a model, they draw it, give it away and this is where their work ends. The second level is tactical , on which designers are already part of the product team, working closely with developers, testers, managers and other specialists. The third level is strategic , it already implies the influence of the designers themselves on the final product.
The design strategy allows you to solve business problems and to achieve the absence of an abrupt quality level, when one project is doing well, the next is bad, and so on. For all this, it is important to know what the company's UX maturity is and what the company's maturity is.
The maturity of the company is very important to understand, because this is the environment in which you will work. The company can be characterized by three main components: resources, processes and priorities. Resources in the most basic sense - money (a budget that can be spent on some basic tasks, at least to maintain the project’s performance and some kind of audience accumulation), people (design professionals, their qualifications and accessibility are important here) time and credibility. The last indicator shows how much the management trusts the design team and listens to its ideas.
The second important component is processes . The first process is the initiation of products , from which the need for their creation is generally taken. The second part is development , here it is important to understand how the work in the company is organized and in what environment you will work. It is also important to understand which artifacts designers will transmit to developers. The third stage is quality assurance . It is important to understand whether the team has an impact on this process, for example, to delay the release if serious problems are found in the design and in the UX. The fourth process is marketing . Usually it happens in two understandings, this is the department that draws banners, flyers, etc., that is, it deals with service, and the second is when marketing is part of the product team, when it penetrates deep into the product — for example, you can take Apple where all this is tightly integrated. It is also important to understand how the promises made in marketing correspond to the reality of the product. The fifth stage - support , that is, at what stages and in what form the company helps the user of the product. It is important that the designer participates in all phases of work.
It is also important to understand the principles of the company - what are the powers of the participants in the work process, and what is their responsibility. It is important how the tasks are coordinated, how the work efficiency is assessed and monitored, plus the organizational structure is important - how exactly the company is divided into products, departments. Another important point - the majority of organizations at the start are small teams, where everyone participates as a whole in the working process. But as the company grows, specialization begins. Because it is important to understand at what stage the company is currently and where it goes.
Finally, every company has a policy - it implies how you communicate with other departments and take their interests into account. If you help some employees to do their job well, then they will help you in the future.
There are also four levels of understanding the designer of his role. The first is a simple solution to development problems , when the designer simply draws any artifacts and gives them to the upper management. The second is when the designer begins to solve the tasks of the users , thinking about them, understanding what the consumer needs. Third, when a designer begins to solve business problems , understanding the needs of a company, what it wants to achieve and how it can solve the problems it faces. The fourth stage, the most interesting - when the designer can ask the company:
It is also important to understand that the company may be ineffective in some general processes, in addition to design. And even if you build an ideal chain of layouts inside you, by giving them out, you may encounter bad developers, or marketers, or someone else. Then everything will be fine in your little world, but then everything will be wrong, which will ultimately affect the quality of the product itself. In this case, the designer will have to intervene in other processes, seeking from other employees an ideal performance of their duties. That is, you will have to change not only your design work process, but also the entire company.
For example, in the Mail.ru company we never lay out things about which it can be said “painted and spoiled everything”. We post the only thing on which there are already working links. If we were able to achieve something good, then there is something to boast about. If you could not - it means you have to work better.
The third, very important component of the company is priorities . This is where the company goes, how it chooses these areas and why they are such. Just because if you do not solve business problems, then over time you will become unnecessary and you will be rejected.
There are several key contexts that influence the choice of parities. The first is the search for a market, a product for it, and a business model. At this point, the company is constantly changing, experimenting, looking for the approach that allows it to accumulate a user base and profit. At this time, it is hard to think about deadlines, because it may happen that your grocery hypothesis did not work, you have to throw out all the developments in a week and go completely the other way. Relatively speaking, the task of creating something you do not need at this stage, but you need to actively participate in research, in studying the audience, in tracking the effectiveness of current decisions, and quickly creating product versions.
The next context is the growth of profits and user base, when the niche is already groped and the product begins to overgrow with some features, and also receives some new ways of distribution. The third stage is when with growth everything is good and the need to retain users increases, when competitors have become stronger, and they need to be somehow rebuilt. It is required to increase the total number of products, quality of services, visual quality of design. The fourth context is the effectiveness of the work on the product portfolio. This is when your company already has a lot of services, there are many different departments, and they have to work somehow coordinated with each other, and the products must be connected, and you need to work to ensure that all this is in a single bundle was good. Finally, a bad context - when a product is in crisis, and you need to save it. Again, in such a situation, it is necessary to forget about some ideal processes and so on, being engaged, firstly, in finding the source of the problem, and secondly, in solving which will allow it to exit. Another critical moment, on which many organizations are pierced - you must have some kind of “advocate at the top,” that is, a top manager who understands that what you are doing helps the product and business, and he stands behind you and pulls you forward. Because very often there are situations in the style of "they saw that the design is fashionable, let's play, we played, we didn't get what we expected - let's part." And many large enough companies puncture this. It is important that the “person above” understands that your work is important, and if he does not understand it, it is important to convey to him the depth of importance with all your strength.
All that is said above is the checklist of the company, its “portrait”, which is important to understand before you begin to do something in design. In addition to this checklist, there are other models of maturity of companies that will also be useful to study. One of the most famous is the Ichak Adizes life cycle model . It clearly shows how the company "lives" and allows you to establish exactly which point of its life cycle you are now.
The second key point is an understanding of how mature your company is, and what path you have to go in order to influence the product and so that your results are not lost “inside” the company and that your development goes exclusively upwards. The first stage is chaos, when design in a company is done haphazardly, and the goal is to solve design problems, even if formally, at least in some way. The final quality is according to the “as lucky” principle. The developers at this stage cope on their own, perhaps the first designers appear who will not be interconnected, it is also possible that outsiders will be connected. This is the stage at which some companies are trampling for a long time, some - endlessly, and some of them jump at all.
The next stage is operational. A company appears in the company, a leader who begins to pull her forward. To move to this stage, management must be aware of its problems. This is what was mentioned at the beginning - negative feedback or user outflow. There are obvious problems in the product that are tied to a design that is constantly criticized and said that something is wrong with you. Inside the company there is a leader, or he comes from the side. The leader shows what exactly the company's problems are and how they can be solved. One of the easiest ways is to conduct a few tests in order to collect real feedback, proving that the company has problems.
The next stage - the emergence of the team and workflow. The team can be assembled on its own, either purchased or organized in some other way. In the West, it is now fashionable to buy entire startups, as a result of which his team either becomes a separate division within the company, or is “scattered” in other divisions. In Russia, too, such methods are used and they are becoming more common. It is important to set the procedure for setting and accepting tasks. Many people underestimate this, in our experience I realized that this was the key problem for everything to start moving. When I came, I thought “we will build the process here in a month”, because I had a good experience in building the process and gathering the team before that, and the company believed in me, and everything seemed to be good, and the company agreed to do it. When we started to do, we saw that the level was stalled and we could not let the task down. Because everything seems to be fine, tasks are set, we carry them out. However, in any of the tasks there are several solutions, because you can solve it, based on different input data and different parities. One solution is better suited for attracting audiences, the other is for the consistency of the entire project portfolio, the third one will better attract advertising, etc. and the more people connect to it, the more such contexts are given. You end up looking at the solution pool and realize that it’s impossible to choose one thing at all.
While we could not fix this process of tasks so that they could be solved here, it was very difficult. As soon as we did this, the whole process immediately began. Therefore, I always try to focus on this.
There are three main levels of planning: short-term (when you, for example, plan for a week), medium-term (planning for a month or a quarter), and long-term (planning for a year or two ahead). At the first stage it is important to learn how to plan at least for the medium and short term. It is also important that some clear, typical processes for performing tasks appear. For example, how do you solve the problem of fulfilling the concept of a product, how do you do testing, how do you set up interface reviews, etc. that is, it is important that under any typical task you have a clear, streamlined and clear process.
It is also very important to choose a toolkit for your work and for creating artifacts, layouts, etc., and for documentation, and for sharing knowledge. It is important that this toolkit work for you. It is possible to connect outsourcers at this stage, but it is important that they do not solve product problems, but some part of problems - for example, you bring them a ready-made concept and they already work in accordance with it. It is important not to give the grocery part out, because it is very time consuming, and at the same time you still do not have an understanding of what the product should be, which makes it difficult for you to work.
I already had the opportunity to look at the process from both the contractor and the customer. I realized that there is an eternal conflict: the contractor’s task is to complete the project as quickly as possible, with as little loss of unplanned resources as possible, while the company's task is to make the product as high as possible. And at the start, the company often does not understand what is needed - it has a certain product hypothesis, but there is no understanding of the details. As soon as the hypothesis begins to turn into something tangible, the problem of alternative paths immediately begins. Therefore, it is better to give out a ready-made, clear-cut task.
It is also important that the process of training and development of end specialists within the company be adjusted. The result of this stage is a team that works perfectly as a production line, produces excellent results and is able to perform any tasks.
When this goal is achieved, you can proceed to the next level - tactical. At this level, you are no longer just a design division, but act as an integral part of the product team. The most important thing is integration, when you are included in all development processes, testing, etc., when you communicate directly with everyone. Not through some kind of manager who transmits your decisions, like a buffer, and sets tasks for you, but directly. It is important to talk with all product managers. It is important that they understand the importance of good design, why you came to this company, why management trusts you, and why you do this. Then they will support you and constantly come to you. They will not come to you with some solution, but they will say, "here we have such and such a problem, help us solve it." At this moment, the team has authority and trust, and it does not have to prove every time, using sweat and blood, that this is right, but this is not right. This authority must be constantly raised and raised, because it ultimately facilitates future work.
Then you are beginning to trust the end specialists, such as layout designers, developers and testers. They themselves come to you, communicate with you directly in the style of "look here: there is a question, help me solve it." After all, everyone knows that just drawing is not enough, and the most difficult thing begins when developing. There are always a lot of white spots, a lot of inconsistencies, there are a lot of problems “getting out” when “dragging” on content, engines, etc. if there is no person who will help to solve this, then the developers will do it themselves, and it is clear that the results will deviate from the initial vision rather strongly. At this point, it is also important that long-term planning emerges when you look a year ahead. You understand what the team will do, know where the products are developed, and how you will be tied to this development. At this moment, a mechanism should appear, thanks to which you can be sure that everything that you drew will eventually appear in the project exactly as it was intended.
Then you can go to the design principles and standards. When what you are doing can already be somehow structured in terms of products and solutions, and on this basis build a certain recognizable person and a predictable quality. For this to appear, you must have “model products”. Such products that you made. Which you like and solve tasks. The critical thing is design technologization. Mobile framework for mobile web, which we have done, and on which we are now actively collecting mobile web, and he allowed us to redraw and quickly run more than 10 projects that look and work the same in 2 months. They are quickly developed and quickly updated, because there is a single engine, and if you change something in one place, then the changes are rolled out on all 13 projects. This is good here than - if you work with layouts or even guidelines, you “run” for each project implementation, and see if the layout is correct, if the guideline is correct, etc. in the end, you will either get tired or hire extra designers who will control all this - and in any case it will be inefficient, useless and long.
What can be done in this situation is to reduce many projects to large ones, when you already have to control not one hundred small projects, but five mega-projects. With this solution, you can be sure that the implementation of the design will be exactly the same as planned in the design itself, and it will be much more convenient for you to control this implementation.
It is also necessary to determine the general principles necessary for the work - the principles according to which the design should exist. You can use bright and juicy projects that convey the "spirit" of design - 10-15 rules that will allow your guidelines to bring together, and then you can influence how projects are created and why they are created at all.
An important thing is the knowledge sharing system. When what you learn on one project is transferred to another when you do not repeat your mistakes, when a company accumulates and develops all this knowledge. You need a toolkit that will allow you to transfer knowledge about the work of projects from one project to another, thereby creating a general understanding of how the company works as a whole. We are now engaged in building a similar toolkit, and this is quite difficult, because it is important both the data collection and analysis system itself and where this data comes from. A knowledge base is created on how users work with products, about competitors, ideas and where they come from are taken into account. At this point, we can say that product ideas are already coming from the bottom up - from designers to product managers and to management. The final stage is when the design is already becoming a means of market differentiation. When it is already an effective tool, when exactly at the expense of design a company can increase profits and its importance in the market. There is a recognizable visual language, and product design can already affect the industry as a whole.
It is also helpful to explore other UX maturity models. There are several of them, one of the coolest - the Nielsen model, which has 8 stages, from the rejection of usability to a large design campaign. Model of Bruce Temkin, which has five levels. The model of the Danish design office, which includes raising to these stages. The Macadamian model is very good, where at each of the stages it is described in detail what skills are required from the design team. There is also a model of adaptive UX-strategy from Andrea Vascellari .
Unfortunately, there is no universal model, and each particular company will have its own situation. Because even if companies have the same goals, the structure inside is always different. And the imposition of the future on reality creates different situations that will be unique for each company. However, the above model can be a good starting point.
Summing up, it should be noted that the higher you progress according to the maturity levels of UX, the better the product will be in the end. We must try to focus on long-term goals. Moreover, it is impossible to deal exclusively with the design process, it is necessary to change other production chains in the company.
Separately, I remind you that the bundle between designers and other employees should be quite close. There should not be such a thing, they say, "I am a manager, so do as I say." Designers and other specialists should work exactly as one team to solve a problem.
Next - today, product designers are highly valued, who understand not only one design, but also many related professions. Therefore, everyone is recommended not to be limited to one design, but to learn related professions.
The whole report can be seen here: uxpeople.ru/video
Hello everyone, my name is Yuri Vetrov (@jvetrov), from the company Mail.ru. Today I will talk about UX-strategy. UX-strategy - it is a kind of necessity, which is long overdue in design. Previously, the design was something of a means for solving basic problems, but today it is becoming more important for products, much more critical, penetrating to the level of “product management”. I will tell you what it is in my vision, as it happens in Mail.ru, and I will try to explain where we are going in general, and in Mail.ru, and, as it seems to me, in the profession.
Presentation of the report: www.slideshare.net/jvetrau/ux-people2013-yvetrovuxstrategy
Full video: uxpeople.ru/video
')
In the ideal world, products are designed at the very start, immediately everything is done in accordance with the ideal processes. However, in life everything is somewhat wrong - at the start of the product it is much more important to prove that it actually exists as a product. It is more important to raise the audience, apply the concept to find your niche, your approach. It happens, by the way, that there is no money at all - a startup has some kind of minimal budget that is spent on the most critical one. Therefore, there is no time left for design. If we take well-known brands as an example, the first version of Windows in 1985 looked like this, was not understood by users or the market, and as a result sold less than 500 thousand copies. Now they have 90% of the market and space runs.
Or if we take Android - when they started, in 2007, everyone scoffed at them. In 2009, they had less than 2%, and again, everyone mocked them. Now everyone knows where they are. Why it happens? Because at the start of the company, profit growth and audience growth are much more important than the quality of the product, much more important than how it is made in terms of the quality of the technical implementation and the quality of the design. It is necessary first to prove that a product basically has the right to exist in the market. Then comes the understanding that design is important. The reasons for this may be different. For example, competitors have intensified, who are doing well with the design, or there is a negative public opinion about the product, or there is a bad feedback from the user, or the user outflow begins, or it just becomes fashionable to design. And at this moment the company moves from aggressive accumulation of the user base to its retention.
In the experience of Mail.ru, it has about 40 products, many of them have tablet and mobile versions, a total of 200 projects. In our division there are about 20. For all products, the monthly audience is over 100 million users. All this ultimately imposes its own limitations - it is dangerous to change something too dramatically and you need to think ten times before you do something.
I share the three levels of UX maturity based on our experience and that of many other companies. The first level is operational , the design team in this case solves the problem of creating artifacts. For an example - the designers are told to create a model, they draw it, give it away and this is where their work ends. The second level is tactical , on which designers are already part of the product team, working closely with developers, testers, managers and other specialists. The third level is strategic , it already implies the influence of the designers themselves on the final product.
The design strategy allows you to solve business problems and to achieve the absence of an abrupt quality level, when one project is doing well, the next is bad, and so on. For all this, it is important to know what the company's UX maturity is and what the company's maturity is.
The maturity of the company is very important to understand, because this is the environment in which you will work. The company can be characterized by three main components: resources, processes and priorities. Resources in the most basic sense - money (a budget that can be spent on some basic tasks, at least to maintain the project’s performance and some kind of audience accumulation), people (design professionals, their qualifications and accessibility are important here) time and credibility. The last indicator shows how much the management trusts the design team and listens to its ideas.
The second important component is processes . The first process is the initiation of products , from which the need for their creation is generally taken. The second part is development , here it is important to understand how the work in the company is organized and in what environment you will work. It is also important to understand which artifacts designers will transmit to developers. The third stage is quality assurance . It is important to understand whether the team has an impact on this process, for example, to delay the release if serious problems are found in the design and in the UX. The fourth process is marketing . Usually it happens in two understandings, this is the department that draws banners, flyers, etc., that is, it deals with service, and the second is when marketing is part of the product team, when it penetrates deep into the product — for example, you can take Apple where all this is tightly integrated. It is also important to understand how the promises made in marketing correspond to the reality of the product. The fifth stage - support , that is, at what stages and in what form the company helps the user of the product. It is important that the designer participates in all phases of work.
It is also important to understand the principles of the company - what are the powers of the participants in the work process, and what is their responsibility. It is important how the tasks are coordinated, how the work efficiency is assessed and monitored, plus the organizational structure is important - how exactly the company is divided into products, departments. Another important point - the majority of organizations at the start are small teams, where everyone participates as a whole in the working process. But as the company grows, specialization begins. Because it is important to understand at what stage the company is currently and where it goes.
Finally, every company has a policy - it implies how you communicate with other departments and take their interests into account. If you help some employees to do their job well, then they will help you in the future.
There are also four levels of understanding the designer of his role. The first is a simple solution to development problems , when the designer simply draws any artifacts and gives them to the upper management. The second is when the designer begins to solve the tasks of the users , thinking about them, understanding what the consumer needs. Third, when a designer begins to solve business problems , understanding the needs of a company, what it wants to achieve and how it can solve the problems it faces. The fourth stage, the most interesting - when the designer can ask the company:
“Do you really need to solve this particular problem?” Maybe you need to solve another? ". The higher you climb these levels, the more you are in demand in the market and more valuable in this company.
It is also important to understand that the company may be ineffective in some general processes, in addition to design. And even if you build an ideal chain of layouts inside you, by giving them out, you may encounter bad developers, or marketers, or someone else. Then everything will be fine in your little world, but then everything will be wrong, which will ultimately affect the quality of the product itself. In this case, the designer will have to intervene in other processes, seeking from other employees an ideal performance of their duties. That is, you will have to change not only your design work process, but also the entire company.
For example, in the Mail.ru company we never lay out things about which it can be said “painted and spoiled everything”. We post the only thing on which there are already working links. If we were able to achieve something good, then there is something to boast about. If you could not - it means you have to work better.
The third, very important component of the company is priorities . This is where the company goes, how it chooses these areas and why they are such. Just because if you do not solve business problems, then over time you will become unnecessary and you will be rejected.
There are several key contexts that influence the choice of parities. The first is the search for a market, a product for it, and a business model. At this point, the company is constantly changing, experimenting, looking for the approach that allows it to accumulate a user base and profit. At this time, it is hard to think about deadlines, because it may happen that your grocery hypothesis did not work, you have to throw out all the developments in a week and go completely the other way. Relatively speaking, the task of creating something you do not need at this stage, but you need to actively participate in research, in studying the audience, in tracking the effectiveness of current decisions, and quickly creating product versions.
The next context is the growth of profits and user base, when the niche is already groped and the product begins to overgrow with some features, and also receives some new ways of distribution. The third stage is when with growth everything is good and the need to retain users increases, when competitors have become stronger, and they need to be somehow rebuilt. It is required to increase the total number of products, quality of services, visual quality of design. The fourth context is the effectiveness of the work on the product portfolio. This is when your company already has a lot of services, there are many different departments, and they have to work somehow coordinated with each other, and the products must be connected, and you need to work to ensure that all this is in a single bundle was good. Finally, a bad context - when a product is in crisis, and you need to save it. Again, in such a situation, it is necessary to forget about some ideal processes and so on, being engaged, firstly, in finding the source of the problem, and secondly, in solving which will allow it to exit. Another critical moment, on which many organizations are pierced - you must have some kind of “advocate at the top,” that is, a top manager who understands that what you are doing helps the product and business, and he stands behind you and pulls you forward. Because very often there are situations in the style of "they saw that the design is fashionable, let's play, we played, we didn't get what we expected - let's part." And many large enough companies puncture this. It is important that the “person above” understands that your work is important, and if he does not understand it, it is important to convey to him the depth of importance with all your strength.
All that is said above is the checklist of the company, its “portrait”, which is important to understand before you begin to do something in design. In addition to this checklist, there are other models of maturity of companies that will also be useful to study. One of the most famous is the Ichak Adizes life cycle model . It clearly shows how the company "lives" and allows you to establish exactly which point of its life cycle you are now.
The second key point is an understanding of how mature your company is, and what path you have to go in order to influence the product and so that your results are not lost “inside” the company and that your development goes exclusively upwards. The first stage is chaos, when design in a company is done haphazardly, and the goal is to solve design problems, even if formally, at least in some way. The final quality is according to the “as lucky” principle. The developers at this stage cope on their own, perhaps the first designers appear who will not be interconnected, it is also possible that outsiders will be connected. This is the stage at which some companies are trampling for a long time, some - endlessly, and some of them jump at all.
The next stage is operational. A company appears in the company, a leader who begins to pull her forward. To move to this stage, management must be aware of its problems. This is what was mentioned at the beginning - negative feedback or user outflow. There are obvious problems in the product that are tied to a design that is constantly criticized and said that something is wrong with you. Inside the company there is a leader, or he comes from the side. The leader shows what exactly the company's problems are and how they can be solved. One of the easiest ways is to conduct a few tests in order to collect real feedback, proving that the company has problems.
The next stage - the emergence of the team and workflow. The team can be assembled on its own, either purchased or organized in some other way. In the West, it is now fashionable to buy entire startups, as a result of which his team either becomes a separate division within the company, or is “scattered” in other divisions. In Russia, too, such methods are used and they are becoming more common. It is important to set the procedure for setting and accepting tasks. Many people underestimate this, in our experience I realized that this was the key problem for everything to start moving. When I came, I thought “we will build the process here in a month”, because I had a good experience in building the process and gathering the team before that, and the company believed in me, and everything seemed to be good, and the company agreed to do it. When we started to do, we saw that the level was stalled and we could not let the task down. Because everything seems to be fine, tasks are set, we carry them out. However, in any of the tasks there are several solutions, because you can solve it, based on different input data and different parities. One solution is better suited for attracting audiences, the other is for the consistency of the entire project portfolio, the third one will better attract advertising, etc. and the more people connect to it, the more such contexts are given. You end up looking at the solution pool and realize that it’s impossible to choose one thing at all.
While we could not fix this process of tasks so that they could be solved here, it was very difficult. As soon as we did this, the whole process immediately began. Therefore, I always try to focus on this.
There are three main levels of planning: short-term (when you, for example, plan for a week), medium-term (planning for a month or a quarter), and long-term (planning for a year or two ahead). At the first stage it is important to learn how to plan at least for the medium and short term. It is also important that some clear, typical processes for performing tasks appear. For example, how do you solve the problem of fulfilling the concept of a product, how do you do testing, how do you set up interface reviews, etc. that is, it is important that under any typical task you have a clear, streamlined and clear process.
It is also very important to choose a toolkit for your work and for creating artifacts, layouts, etc., and for documentation, and for sharing knowledge. It is important that this toolkit work for you. It is possible to connect outsourcers at this stage, but it is important that they do not solve product problems, but some part of problems - for example, you bring them a ready-made concept and they already work in accordance with it. It is important not to give the grocery part out, because it is very time consuming, and at the same time you still do not have an understanding of what the product should be, which makes it difficult for you to work.
I already had the opportunity to look at the process from both the contractor and the customer. I realized that there is an eternal conflict: the contractor’s task is to complete the project as quickly as possible, with as little loss of unplanned resources as possible, while the company's task is to make the product as high as possible. And at the start, the company often does not understand what is needed - it has a certain product hypothesis, but there is no understanding of the details. As soon as the hypothesis begins to turn into something tangible, the problem of alternative paths immediately begins. Therefore, it is better to give out a ready-made, clear-cut task.
It is also important that the process of training and development of end specialists within the company be adjusted. The result of this stage is a team that works perfectly as a production line, produces excellent results and is able to perform any tasks.
When this goal is achieved, you can proceed to the next level - tactical. At this level, you are no longer just a design division, but act as an integral part of the product team. The most important thing is integration, when you are included in all development processes, testing, etc., when you communicate directly with everyone. Not through some kind of manager who transmits your decisions, like a buffer, and sets tasks for you, but directly. It is important to talk with all product managers. It is important that they understand the importance of good design, why you came to this company, why management trusts you, and why you do this. Then they will support you and constantly come to you. They will not come to you with some solution, but they will say, "here we have such and such a problem, help us solve it." At this moment, the team has authority and trust, and it does not have to prove every time, using sweat and blood, that this is right, but this is not right. This authority must be constantly raised and raised, because it ultimately facilitates future work.
Then you are beginning to trust the end specialists, such as layout designers, developers and testers. They themselves come to you, communicate with you directly in the style of "look here: there is a question, help me solve it." After all, everyone knows that just drawing is not enough, and the most difficult thing begins when developing. There are always a lot of white spots, a lot of inconsistencies, there are a lot of problems “getting out” when “dragging” on content, engines, etc. if there is no person who will help to solve this, then the developers will do it themselves, and it is clear that the results will deviate from the initial vision rather strongly. At this point, it is also important that long-term planning emerges when you look a year ahead. You understand what the team will do, know where the products are developed, and how you will be tied to this development. At this moment, a mechanism should appear, thanks to which you can be sure that everything that you drew will eventually appear in the project exactly as it was intended.
Then you can go to the design principles and standards. When what you are doing can already be somehow structured in terms of products and solutions, and on this basis build a certain recognizable person and a predictable quality. For this to appear, you must have “model products”. Such products that you made. Which you like and solve tasks. The critical thing is design technologization. Mobile framework for mobile web, which we have done, and on which we are now actively collecting mobile web, and he allowed us to redraw and quickly run more than 10 projects that look and work the same in 2 months. They are quickly developed and quickly updated, because there is a single engine, and if you change something in one place, then the changes are rolled out on all 13 projects. This is good here than - if you work with layouts or even guidelines, you “run” for each project implementation, and see if the layout is correct, if the guideline is correct, etc. in the end, you will either get tired or hire extra designers who will control all this - and in any case it will be inefficient, useless and long.
What can be done in this situation is to reduce many projects to large ones, when you already have to control not one hundred small projects, but five mega-projects. With this solution, you can be sure that the implementation of the design will be exactly the same as planned in the design itself, and it will be much more convenient for you to control this implementation.
It is also necessary to determine the general principles necessary for the work - the principles according to which the design should exist. You can use bright and juicy projects that convey the "spirit" of design - 10-15 rules that will allow your guidelines to bring together, and then you can influence how projects are created and why they are created at all.
An important thing is the knowledge sharing system. When what you learn on one project is transferred to another when you do not repeat your mistakes, when a company accumulates and develops all this knowledge. You need a toolkit that will allow you to transfer knowledge about the work of projects from one project to another, thereby creating a general understanding of how the company works as a whole. We are now engaged in building a similar toolkit, and this is quite difficult, because it is important both the data collection and analysis system itself and where this data comes from. A knowledge base is created on how users work with products, about competitors, ideas and where they come from are taken into account. At this point, we can say that product ideas are already coming from the bottom up - from designers to product managers and to management. The final stage is when the design is already becoming a means of market differentiation. When it is already an effective tool, when exactly at the expense of design a company can increase profits and its importance in the market. There is a recognizable visual language, and product design can already affect the industry as a whole.
It is also helpful to explore other UX maturity models. There are several of them, one of the coolest - the Nielsen model, which has 8 stages, from the rejection of usability to a large design campaign. Model of Bruce Temkin, which has five levels. The model of the Danish design office, which includes raising to these stages. The Macadamian model is very good, where at each of the stages it is described in detail what skills are required from the design team. There is also a model of adaptive UX-strategy from Andrea Vascellari .
Unfortunately, there is no universal model, and each particular company will have its own situation. Because even if companies have the same goals, the structure inside is always different. And the imposition of the future on reality creates different situations that will be unique for each company. However, the above model can be a good starting point.
Summing up, it should be noted that the higher you progress according to the maturity levels of UX, the better the product will be in the end. We must try to focus on long-term goals. Moreover, it is impossible to deal exclusively with the design process, it is necessary to change other production chains in the company.
Separately, I remind you that the bundle between designers and other employees should be quite close. There should not be such a thing, they say, "I am a manager, so do as I say." Designers and other specialists should work exactly as one team to solve a problem.
Next - today, product designers are highly valued, who understand not only one design, but also many related professions. Therefore, everyone is recommended not to be limited to one design, but to learn related professions.
The whole report can be seen here: uxpeople.ru/video
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/258869/
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