Discovery + Design Ops
“I’ve always been impressed with his understanding of not just the basic mechanisms of UX/UI, but also his academic understanding of the studies on human behavior that inform what it means to create a good UX/UI.”
— Director of Client Services
Establishing UX at a Start-up
Overview
As the first UX hire at a tech start-up, I came into an environment that did not have UX experience or processes in place.
Challenge
The company had an established platform that was industry-leading from an engineering standpoint, but was designed poorly in terms of UX heuristics. The company had been founded 4 years prior, with product decisions being made by business or engineering leaders exclusively.
Results
Discovery Process from Zero
In Abstract
The process was developed by combining discovery process models from Nielsen Norman group and Inspired by Marty Cagan, plus personal experience on what does and doesn’t work as well in practice. The process page is meant to be a living document that is updated as it’s used and folks learn what works and doesn’t for this specific team.
Scrolling through sections from a Discovery Process document in Confluence. Sections seen include a double-diamond diagram, embedded Trello board, and approach and potential outputs of discover and define activities.
In Practice
As a fully remote company, interviews and ideation sessions could all be recorded, leading to more integrity in follow-up notes and documentation around everything from problem statements to technical direction of solution ideas to qualitative value testing.
Image from the user research section of a discovery document. Shown is an action item to perform an alpha client interview, an embedded zoom recording, and interview notes.
Design Ops from Zero
One process that was created was creating in-line documentation or sticker sheets in Figma to match documentation in Jira.
It also included a checklist to confirm that slips and error handling were considered during the design process.
Guides for how to create this documentation was created for anyone new entering the team.
A written section describing the thought process and behavior for a delete action in Figma.
Documentation in Jira and Confluence also needed to be reliable and consistent. This included defining the formal definition of done for design tasks and format for writing stories and acceptance criteria.