Boosting Design Quality

Berjesty Kozanoglu at UXDX Community: Online. Video: https://youtu.be/_z4sk_fcSvQ

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and agenda

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, thank you Rory for the introduction. I'm really happy to be here. I'm going to talk through some really exciting stuff. If you're especially working in large organizations and enterprises, the topic is probably near to your heart. I'm going to talk about how to boost design quality at large organizations, and there are some strategies to overcome the challenges that are in our environment.

[00:00:37] So today's agenda: we'll go over what design quality is, what the status quo is looking like, smart strategies and principles to follow that are more on the tactical side, and we'll have some time at the end to summarize and do takeaways and have time for a Q&A hopefully. And the goal is to really define what those existing challenges are that are faced by large enterprises in the realm of UX, and leave with practical strategies on how to overcome those effectively.

[00:01:15] Ice breaker: how do you feel today? I'm around in between 1 to 3. I hope everybody's having a great day so far, it's not over yet. I'm located in Toronto so my today is midday right now. I hope you had a great day in Europe, wherever you are.

The challenges of large enterprises

[00:01:37] All right, boosting UX design quality in large enterprises. There are really unique challenges in large companies, and we're going to talk a little bit about the complex hierarchies that are occurring in large organizations, silo teams and diverse stakeholders. These are all parts of large organizations, and there are some strategies for equipping design leaders to successfully overcome these challenges.

[00:02:15] When I mean complex hierarchies, this is apparent to any large organization and it needs to be there. However, that brings also multiple decision levels, and this makes the decision making very slow, especially speaking from the UX side. We've all seen this, and if you're even applying agile methodology there's still stakeholders that need to sign off, there's multiple layers that need to be vetted by, and this makes it not as efficient as you want it to be as a designer.

[00:02:58] Silo teams: so teams work on their own, and things can get buried under other priorities, and this happens quite often as well. Limited cross team collaboration: if one team is working on one thing and the other one is not aware of the other priority, they may not have the opportunity to speak and get consensus on these priorities, and that creates a silo team. And lack of knowledge sharing, especially if you don't have that environment set up in a way where people can talk to each other across teams.

[00:03:39] And the other is basically varied interests and user needs. Each stakeholder — we have many stakeholders in large organizations — and basically each department has their own priority list and has their own interest. So this happens to be having varied interests and user needs from each perspective, and sometimes you do struggle to prioritize between them internally.

Strategy one: a UX design center of excellence

[00:04:14] So what does that really mean for UX? Well, I do recommend, from my experience over 15 years in the UX field, to establish a UX design center of excellence, CoE in short. And what that means is basically creating a dedicated, centralized hub for the organization that you're working at, that focuses on all aspects of user experience design. And this is basically the epicenter of the user experience standards, best practices, everything that you can think about from a UX perspective.

[00:05:01] What it does is it creates centralized UX expertise, which will enable the UX team to have the opportunity to look at all these priorities that could be competing, could not be competing, but have the opportunity to have a look. And it basically promotes the best practices across these stakeholders, especially in large organizations, and fosters cross team collaboration. And this will enable your teams to streamline some of the resources so that you can prioritize the right things, the right product features, the right timelines and milestones that your company wants to achieve.

[00:05:51] Key functions of a CoE from a UX perspective, center of excellence again for CoE. So it's really going to help you establish some best practices across the organization, and developing and disseminating best practices and design guidelines will align with the organization's overall goals and values, which will also impact all those challenges that I've mentioned earlier.

[00:06:25] So this will also create some training and mentorship opportunities, by creating training and mentorship programs for design teams to really improve the skills and stay updated with the industry trends. And user research and user insights: conducting user research and gathering insights to inform design decisions across various projects. And finally, but not least, quality assurance. So it will ensure the quality of UX designed, by performing audits — looking at reviews, if you have an app, app reviews are a great way to audit — and assessments overall across all the metrics that are being tracked.

[00:07:14] And yeah, the benefits are not just this little list, but these are the basics that I can think of. Basically having a center of excellence of a UX team will help your standardization of the practices in place, bring the right expertise, and help with the resource optimization, and allow for cross team collaboration.

Strategy two: a design system

[00:07:43] All right, the second strategy is developing a design system. If you do not have a design system and you're in a large organization, I would strongly consider having one, or having the basics of a design system. What a design system is, it's really a comprehensive set of guidelines and components — and we call them design components in the UX world. These are assets that we define based on the visual and interactive elements of a product's UI, user interface. So it's really acting as the unified design language for any organization. This will be specific to your own organization, so it will have your own brand guides and also your own brand design principles across.

[00:08:46] And the benefits of having a design system: it will allow you to have a unified design language, consistency across products, streamlined design and development process, so that developers don't have to start from scratch when they're working on a product, or designers don't have to start from scratch when they're solving for another product feature. They might just simply pull the component that's available, that's used on another page, but focus more on the user needs for that specific product feature instead of focusing on rebuilding the UI component. And it really helps you to scale, so easier scaling as new features and products are introduced, as I mentioned, which will have an effect on having a cohesive user experience.

Strategy three: user centered thinking

[00:09:40] The third strategy is user centered thinking. I'm sure you've heard of user centered design thinking before, and this is a subject that's really in the hot topics of UX. What it is, is it's an iterative problem solving approach, and it's really what all the designers are taking forward. However, we need to, regardless of the hats that we're wearing in an organization, whether that's marketing, whether that's product, whether that's development, I'd always recommend to have this mindset of user centered design thinking.

[00:10:21] And this is about placing the needs and preferences of the end users at the forefront of the design process. So before you design anything you think about the user needs and prioritize those, conduct user research, have a safe environment to gather feedback. And this should be continuous. It's not after you build the product you forget about the feedback loop. This often happens in large organizations: when you have a big milestone, you build it and then you move on to the next big shiny thing. You should always keep an eye on the things you build so that you can improve them, and this is all about user centered design thinking and user centered design decision making.

[00:11:10] So some of the principles of user centered design thinking are having empathy for the users, defining what the goal is and the problem you're solving for, ideate together, prototype and test, and then go back to empathizing again, just with the new product features that you're thinking to implement.

[00:11:38] The benefits are a lot. I've just listed a few here. Enhanced user satisfaction: when you start building products with the user centered design thinking method, you'll reduce the risk, you'll have more innovation and efficiency in the ways you're working internally and externally. Implementation is really these steps, and it's very straightforward and short, and keeping it lean is important so that your projects don't overrun. It's about user research, personas, user journeys, usability testing and iterative design. So you start with research, create personas, journeys, whichever is applicable, you can do both, and then you run the designs in usability testing environments, or guerrilla testing if you don't have any budget, and you reiterate on the designs.

Cross functional collaboration and UX leadership training

[00:12:40] And cross functional collaboration. The strategy for allowing for cross functional collaboration is to aim for breaking down those silos between the teams, increase the collaboration across. So think of ways, as leaders in your organizations, to foster those across teams: share knowledge and insights with each other, improve communication, and find new ways. If the ways that you have already don't work, then maybe it's time for a change, and ask people even internally how and what is the best way to communicate with each other so that you can improve that interdepartmental communication.

[00:13:35] The other strategy that I would advise this team is to have UX leadership training, not just for UX leaders, however, really equipping your other team members, stakeholders, with skills that are focused on user experience and leadership. You can have leadership development programs. I'm sure you already have some, but allowing other team members to participate in these will allow you to have better design quality in the teams, and cultivating a design driven culture and really encouraging innovation.

Strategy: robust UX research

[00:14:16] Have a robust UX research: this is the other strategy. So what that means is having an in-depth user understanding. And what I see at different organizations I worked in in the past is they have in-depth user understanding, but where they lack is sharing this information with each other, and not having enough documentation that is applicable to the areas that people are interested in.

[00:14:53] So people are always interested in UX research, in what people are saying about their product. However, there's no channel to communicate this, or there's no way of knowing what's being tested right now and what users are saying. Some people are not even aware that a UX research team exists in their organization. So having a more vocal presentation of your UX research initiatives is really important in terms of creating awareness and understanding what the current challenges you're facing are, for all the other stakeholders too, not just for the UX team. And updating these user personas and journeys with the feedback you're getting from the research and all the details.

Agility, and changing "we've always done it this way"

[00:15:52] Having data-driven decision making, super important, and having a competitive analysis is also really important. I'm going to talk a little bit more about data because this is very important, so I have a few slides that I'll mention about what's important. But before I do that, the other important strategy is to have an agile UX design team, to improve the design quality at your organizations. So what that means is having iterative design and development, quick feedback loops, adapt to changing requirements. Being able to be flexible is really key, and be able to respond to those challenges. How fast you respond to that is super important.

[00:16:45] I've had experiences where people build things and the way that the product functioned was like that for a while, and when someone is challenging that with, why do we have to keep doing it this way, you get a response from someone saying, oh, we've always done it this way. So I'm sure many of you have heard of this, whether in stakeholder meetings or other places, where, oh, we've always done it this way. That doesn't mean that you can't change it, right? So changing that mindset is super important.

[00:17:31] However, people like to listen to more facts, and sharing those UX research insights with those types of feedback loops internally will allow people to get to know more about the trends and the feedback that you're receiving, so that that will help you negotiate those terms to change things. Just because you've done it that way for so many years doesn't mean you have to continue if it's not for the better. So it's all tying all of them together really.

Metrics and KPIs

[00:18:06] All right, I want to talk a little bit about metrics and KPIs, because this is super important. I think every organization should pay very close attention to what they're measuring, and there are a couple of things that you can keep an eye on. If you don't have these metrics, don't worry, there are other ways to gather these metrics as well, that are maybe cheaper and more affordable. However, it's really important to understand what they are and communicate with your team members why they're important. And really, a successful product is always successful when you understand user behavior from a data perspective and drive continuous improvement.

[00:18:58] Some of the types of UX design metrics and KPIs. This is going to be a little bit technical here. So there are four high level things that you can look at. One is usability metrics. Within this area, I'm not going to talk about everything, you can have a look at these metrics in the slides afterwards: task success rate, time on task, error rate. There are engagement metrics, where you can keep an eye on user engagement rate, bounce rate, time on site. User satisfaction metrics: I'm sure some of the UX and external-to-UX people are also tracking these, net promoter score, which is NPS, customer satisfaction, system usability scale. Conversion metrics: what's the conversion rate, clickthrough rate, CTR, and churn rate.

[00:19:57] So these are super important metrics, and you don't have to have all of them just to have a successful product. However, some of them may be more important for you depending on your need than the others. So determining what's important for you is more important than having a 100% eye on everything, because that can be very challenging.

[00:20:24] Okay, and it's about aligning metrics with business goals. What do you do with these metrics and KPIs once you have them? So you should align the specific business objectives with the UX design goals. And if the primary business goal is to increase revenue, the relevant UX metric can be the conversion rate and the average order value. So depending on what's important for you, have a look at those to select what's the best way to evaluate your progress.

[00:21:04] And yeah, a lot of companies have to integrate design with quantification, and I can't emphasize enough to have an eye on data. If you're a designer or a UX leader, your best friend should be your data analytics person in the enterprise, no matter how large or small the company is.

Case study: a fintech company scoring design quality

[00:21:34] And operational organizations prioritize data and efficiency. A case study that I'm going to go over very quickly, because we may not have enough time to go through it all: this is about a fintech company that I've studied, and they accumulated UX debt due to very rapid growth. And the challenge was integrating design with quantification and performance metrics. This is happening, believe me, a lot in big organizations.

[00:22:09] And this fintech company adopted a work reduction initiative in 2020 when Covid hit, and they chose heuristic evaluations to assess the design quality and reduce user workload. They evaluated about 55 workflows — okay, that's a lot — in nine two-week sprints, using Nielsen's heuristics. The design quality scoring system is what they developed, and they created this to assess the design quality. And a panel of research experts assigned — this is a real case study, it's not made up — a panel of research experts assigned design quality ratings for each heuristic, and the results really provided an overall design quality score for each workflow, the 55 workflows that I mentioned earlier. So they had a score for each one of them, based on Nielsen's usability heuristics.

[00:23:21] And the outcome for that was a collaborative effort. It involved DesignOps teams, designers, product managers, engineers, however you can think, all the experts. And over 350 findings came out from this study, and the findings were distilled into themes. They organized them into themes and global recommendations for the product teams and leadership.

[00:23:53] The outcomes were very transformative, and teams began sharing design quality scores and addressing major things found in these evaluations. The UX org was trained in heuristic evaluations. They understood better what those usability heuristics mean for their own product. And they created a tracking system that they implemented to monitor these changes over time and the design quality progress. And they also ended up creating a common language for discussing design at operational levels.

[00:24:32] The takeaway is, create a framework for discussing and addressing UX debt in operational organizations. And this is not specific just for operational, it's really about creating that sustainable framework and environment to discuss and address UX debt that we incur over time, and providing and fostering a culture for improved user experience.

What premium quality UX includes, and takeaways

[00:25:03] Premium quality of UX design includes the following: focus on the user, business value — I'm wrapping up — flexibility to reiterate, and consistency, having reusable components, having inclusive design principles and inclusive UI components, ethics, security, performance, measurability, and adding that delight for your users. These are going to help you achieve the premium quality in UX design, and it's all these principles that differentiate high quality products. All of them collectively work together to create a superior UX.

[00:25:50] Some few other takeaways. Boosting UX design in large organizations is highly strategic, and it allows you to address complex hierarchies, silos, diverse stakeholders, all of the challenges that come with working in large organizations. And implementing these strategies empowers design leaders for successful products. And that's a wrap, thank you.