When I first started at Skipio, it became apparent that there really wasn't a formal product and UX strategy to move the work forward. Decisions were made inconsistently and without thought to the product or the people using the platform.
Immediately, I decided to draft and implement a set of principles and guides that would help the business make better decisions and something that product and UX could evangelize through out the company. The following is the initial document created to address some of these issues.
Strategy Defined
Defined: UX strategy creates a game plan that looks at your current position and then helps you get to where you actually want to be.
Product strategy is not UX strategy.
UX strategy makes a case for all touch points and creates an ecosystem of products that affect the users journey to accomplishing the task they have set out to do. UX design is the execution of that strategy through the creation of digital artifacts.
The Principles
Skipio’s UX strategy will be guided by several principles that will allow UX to align to business goals and guide Skipio using variable, iterative and continuous feedback loops. These principles are Skipio’s “North Star”. Using these principles will help Skipio become agile and move quickly to accomplish its goals.
Principle 1 - Let data empower us Decisions on the best user experience are generally made based on past experience and intuition. This can be problematic as problems solved in the past are not the problems we are trying to solve now.
As a company we need to reinforce those intuitions with data from internal sources (marketing, customer success, sales) and external sources (Pendo, Hotjar, user research, usability testing, etc).
Principle 2 - Educate the user to empower them with our software As we build and implement both external and internal application education our users will feel empowered to user our software to build their business. This empowerment will translate to a better user experience and additional information for the business through a tighter feedback loop.
UX will design reusable templates for in-app education in Pendo and assist CS as needed to design a strategy around user education and support. Principle 3 - Focus on key tasks The strategy here is to focus on those items that will net the greatest benefit and return on investment. The UX strategy here is to identify the key user needs and align them to business constraints and goals.
UX will participate and engage in the development and maintenance of the product roadmap keeping eye on product initiatives such as marketing automation, managed accounts, team inbox, etc.
Process and Systems
In any organization, there are systems in place that are used to advance projects and goals. Whether they are documented and understood is another question. This part of the strategy was to realize and surface needed processes and formal systems to build the Skipio platform.
Pattern Library UX will create and maintain and library of reusable patterns that can be discovered, understood and used appropriately by other departments and individuals within Skipio.
A pattern library *is not* a policing document but rather a collaborative tool to help bring to the forefront previously tested and usable solutions to our digital products.
Patterns will include: * Navigation: Menus, footers, pagination, breadcrumbs, etc * Selection: Toggles, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, lists, etc * Search: Filtering and sorting, information architecture. * Messaging: Notifications, alerts, errors, modals. * Data: Tables, data viz, etc * Visual: Typography, color, alignment, proximity, etc.
Adoption and Change Management Design reviews will be held bi-weekly to discuss and propose additional patterns or propose changes to existing patterns.
Outcomes
Leading the UX effort meant getting buy in from the executive team, evangelizing and promoting to the product teams and engineering team and building the artifacts needed to make all this happen.
We began with a presentation to management for buy-in and presented information like cost to build, cost savings and other reasons for beginning this initiative. Once we had buy-in, we took this initiative to the product and engineering teams. It was well received and work began in earnest to put the infrastructure in place to make it happen.
Sketch was used along with Abstract for version control to create the style guides and pattern libraries necessary to build upon.
Future work would have included building out the components in our React library and institute change management processes for future development and growth.