Design Leadership - My key responsibilities
Project Kickoff
I lead the kickoff for any new UX project to ensure the alignment of stakeholders and UX expectations. If required, I provide an overview of how the UX team functions. Together we establish the right credence for the project and rhythm for communication.
Design Approach
Overall approaches changes based on the nature of the project, which includes new vs. enhancement, one feature vs the entire product; typically, projects are assigned a tier according to their size.
Scope & Prioritization
I worked closely with UX designer to plan the UX strategy by breaking down the scope into UX-specific tasks by different phases and helping prioritize the tasks. If needed, additional researchers/designers are assigned to the project.
Internal Review
I constantly conduct project-specific UX reviews before the design is shared with the stack-holders to find the issues early on, with respect to conformance with UX principles and consistent use of patterns and components.
Stakeholder Review
I participate in the stakeholder design review with the UX designer to ensure that we have the right tone and tempo as per the audience. As and when situations arise, I jump in as UX advocate to convince the stakeholders about the design decisions. If needed, I revisit/tweak the design approach.
Challenge & Learn
My engagement in a UX project changes based on the maturity and experience of assigned UX designers, ensuring that they are always challenged to learn something new but not blocked, when it comes to how to go about a specific UX project's execution.
Mentorship on the Go
As and when needed, I mentor the UX designer across the entire experience process, anywhere from how to go about design analysis to help decide the design patterns. Point them to contextual resources, cross-team work, or discuss the pragmatic way to find the solution.
Team Visibility
Quarterly, I share the key UX accomplishment to executive leadership; share UX road map and its alignment with organizational goals. Monthly, UX project status updates to all LOB heads and leadership. Time to time nominate spot bonuses and awards for the team as they accomplish challenging projects/tasks
Team Communication
I conduct daily standup meetings to bring everyone on the same page, iterate on what we are doing, understand team needs and resolve any blockers
Onboarding
I hold onboarding sessions on UX overview, UX best practices, tools & resources, and domain basics to new hires within the design team, to leads across cross-functions, and to leadership.
The UX Process @ Edifecs
Requirement one-pager from the product team
Persona creation and review
BPM analysis
User metal model
User flow creation
Validation with stakeholders and end-users.
For each user flow - design steps follow
Design ideation (whiteboarding)
Draft wireframe creation(Hifi)
Internal review and Iterate the design
Review share with stack-holders
Iterate and align the design
design validation with end-user
Iterate the design based on end-users feedback
While UX project kickoffs; I work closely with the lead designer to determine the optimal UCD process for a specific project. Typically, if it is a tier-1 project, which is designing the experience for a new product, the UX process is being used as shown below.