Enterprise UX — Design Leadership within the Enterprise
Harmonizing multiple trains, moving on multiple paths
“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.” ~Kevin Kruse, “What Is Leadership?” (Forbes, April 2013)
I decided to start off this article with the quote above from Kruse, since discussing the topics of “Enterprise UX” heavily involves the topic of “design leadership.” I’ve worked at several corporations, harmonizing design efforts across simultaneous projects with multiple teams, is always an on-going effort. Keeping a level of design synchronization needs to be a proactive goal for all those individuals involved.
“Developers are working within the ‘medium’ (art) of code. […we’re working in] the medium of the mind, focused on people, their goals, and their strengths.” ~Chris Nosessel
Let me take you back to Spring 2013, as we enter the environment of a global software development company. The concept of “user experience” was just finding its way into the company culture. Well, at least to some people, it seemed like the latest buzz word to drop into discussions at meetings, just as were the terms “scalable,” “tiger team,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “layers of the onion,” just to name a few. I had just transitioned my role within the organization to take on an entry-level management position. The task at hand was to increase the quality of the user experience across the company’s website as well as across the technology products sold to customers. It’s not a task one can do alone, and required the support, assistance, and brain-power of my team, peers, colleagues, and management. Little did I know the long hours, yet valuable lessons that were ahead of me.
Communication + Coordination + Collaboration
Orchestrating multiple trains, moving on multiple tracks with harmony
After brainstorming with my colleagues early-on, we decided to establish a common set of colors as a color palette. We arrived at this decision after hearing from several developers that they would spend significant amounts of time during meetings arguing over the shade of a color to use for a button. The company already had a color palette as part of the marketing and branding, however these were very bold, robust colors intended to be eye-catching on brochures and signage. A new set of colors was needed for use within the visual design of a software application. Constraints needed to be factored into this set of colors for color contrast, accessibility and eye-fatigue. Some colleagues with expertise in color theory tackled this challenge to create a software-focused color palette as a derivative of the company branding color palette. This was just the beginning, and yet later it became the central foundation of building blocks.
“If everyone is moving together, then success takes care of itself.” ~Henry Ford
From customer feedback, we found cases where various existing products were using different icons to have the same meaning, as well as the same icon to have different meanings. Arguably when a person would use a single product from the company’s product line, this was fine. However, where this quickly broke-down was when, as most customers did, use more than one product within their job function. This led to points of confusion and even frustration for customers. An over simplified example, if an icon for delete in some products was an eraser icon, in other products was a trash can icon, and even in others was simply an “X” icon. This was another occurrence of unnecessary redundancy when it came to designing and preparing all the graphical assets. Also, this is a very rudimentary example of the multiple trains going on multiple paths, without coordination and synchronization. If only they could be more like birds.
From some lessons learned, we would have established a design patterns library at a much earlier stage in the journey. We found we needed a centralized location to retain and communicate all the user interface (UI) elements across the various use cases. Examples of these UI elements included, visual styles for buttons and button states (such as hover, focused, disabled, toggled, etc.), dropdown menus, tabs, accordions, page titles, etc. Philosophically these elements were building blocks that could form a strong foundation. Combinations of these elements for specific use-cases were described as Patterns.
At first, we tried to achieve this with PDF files exported from design software. However, this posed a huge challenge when some people would be referencing outdated drafts of the documents. Finally, the documentation of the designs was ported to a web-based home which was nicknamed the “library.” Just as books in a library are stored, some are read more often than others and some books have new editions from their original publications. This library allowed us evolve with the designs.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” ~Socrates, “Way of the Peaceful Warrior” (1980) by Dan Millman.
One of the next levels deeper to increasing the design aesthetics across the organization is to document a collection of user interface (UI) elements. The list of UI elements that may be needed can quickly become an overwhelming laundry list, but start with typical elements such as styles of buttons as well as their different states: default, hover/focus, toggled/selected, disabled, etc. Documenting these as a collection will begin to establish common building blocks. If possible, provide in the collection not only visual examples of each building block but also their related code snippets. This will hopefully increase adoption with developers by providing them with ready-to-use items thus make their job easier. Over time your collection can expand to include other elements, for example: dropdown menus, tabs, accordions, modal dialogs, navigation menus, page titles, etc. Some variations of these, may be needed, in other words there may need to be more than style for tabs depending on the scenario of how the tabs are used. The collection should be an ever-evolving guide, when an existing building block doesn’t work for a new scenario the guideline is: the new style is documented within the collection, which allows for others in the organization to potentially use.
Arguably one of the most challenging items to influence is the behavior of an application, also known as the UX interaction design. This takes effort to collaborate with developers to achieve a truly delightful experience for the users of your application. Some examples of interaction design include:
- what occurs when a person clicks or taps on a specific button?
- Is the application’s behavior the response expected by the person?
- Do other UI elements within close-proximity have the same behavior?
- Even a step further, do other elements of the same type within the application always behave the same way?
- Is this true across all your products and applications (with the caveat of the various nuances between expected behaviors of different device platforms such as: web vs mobile, even more so Android mobile vs Apple mobile, as well as Windows desktop vs Mac desktop, etc.).
In a similar sense to #4, do the applications and products across the organization use similar workflows for related processes? Let’s use an example of a workflow to create a new event listing. An approach to harmonize applications would be to have a similar workflow using an iPad application, as to the workflow using a web-based application. This approach can help to increase the familiarity across the products and applications offered by your organization, furthermore potentially decreasing the learning-curve across these applications. The topic of interaction design and user experience design can go beyond the behavior of a button or dropdown menu, these topics are certainly related to workflows across multiple pages/screens. It usually takes collaboration with multiple individuals to harmonize the experience design of related workflows, across multiple products and applications.
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” ~Michael Jordan
It’s a team effort to keep all the trains on-time, and running efficiently
Even with having these in place… evolving, still was a sophisticated effort to stay harmonized, but it provided tools to design faster and to adapt as a collective unit. Don’t work harder, but rather work smarter together.
Design is a team sport. It’s neither a spectator sport, nor a solo sport. Design cuts across numerous disciplines. It by definition, design is iterative and messy. The word “design” can be used as both a verb and a noun. One of the definitions from Merriam-Webster states “the process of planning how something will look, happen, be made, etc.” This requires communication and collaboration, as well as cutting through organizational silos.
In many sports a team will huddle together during a game to determine the next play and communicate the plan to all the players. The same philosophy can be applied to the business environment.
A Design Huddle is the coming together of various cross-functional individuals once or twice per year to tackle the larger design challenges for the entire organization. You can call-upon attendees to submit discussion topics prior to the scheduled meeting. Depending on the size of the group, consider having them divide into smaller breakout groups. Discuss as a group, through a facilitated manner:
- What’s working?
- What’s not working?
- Which design elements should be redesigned at a comprehensive, company-wide level?
For those in the developer community, think of a “Design Huddle” as a hackathon, just without any programming. Another way to think of it, as a session of internal, cross-department presentations for sharing design best practices and brainstorming.
“Strive not to be a success, but to be of value.” ~Albert Einstein
There are various types of leaders, formally organized and organically established. “Leadership isn’t about being in charge. It’s about taking care of those in your charge” ~Simon Sinek. On your journey of social influence to enhance the design-thinking strengths within your organization, I wish you well. Work towards achieving common goals for the organization.
Send me a note… I’d like to hear about your journey.
Garofalo Studios is here to assist your team to work through the complexities of designing for an enterprise organization. To learn more about the user experience and interactive strategy consulting services for enterprise organizations, visit: www.garofalostudios.com/enterprise
Garofalo Studios also offers subscription plans for UX design help: www.uxsubscription.com
