Design as a facilitator

In this project design played the role of a facilitator, helping the involved areas to communicate, empathize, and work as an overall team. It was an interesting process to change a ingrained mindset of what design is through daily actions.

Also, this project challenged me to develop and improve my management skills as: planning, organizing, problem solving and decision-making.

Role
UX/UI Designer.

Duration and location
February 2020 to July 2021 at Mexico City.

Activities:
Communication improvement between involved areas, Co-creation sessions, Interaction flow definition, Mockup design, Design system implementation, Management and Deliverables estimation.

Background

Profuturo is a company in Mexico on about retirement funds. They are investing in creating an internal product to develop a BPM to optimize the internal processes. The structure is compound by 21 processes and each process has its own work cell. The areas that are involve in the project are the Client, Architecture, Business, UX, Dev and QA.

Work flow

Old work flow

When I entered the project, it was already stablished a work flow. Where the only sessions to get the necessary information for each cell were Client – Business (sometimes also IA was invited) and the gotten information was passed as a waterfall to the other areas, so this was causing delays in the due dates and also some discomfort with the client.

The UX team (at the beginning we were 3 members) was consider one of the last steps in the waterfall. Our only duty was to create the screens needed from spreadsheets that BS obtained during sessions with client. We were technically only delivery, but as a team we saw a big opportunity to help.

New work flow

Our main objective was to create a a collaborative interaction where communication was the key. Instead of having a waterfall process we were searching to push an overall interaction between areas:

The Process

We started with a workshop to review a cell user flow with different stakeholders, so all together could visualize how each area sees the process and what are their own necessities. Also, we made it visible in the wall and this made people that didn’t participate in the activity approach later with curiosity.

Co-creative sessions

We created an alliance with business, together we analyzed the information gathered from the client, made the flows and basis for the screens. Then we consulted with architecture and development making small internal sessions so everybody could listen and co-create the final mockups. With this, business became aware of our capacity and we started to participate more often in sessions with clients. This evolved to a point where sessions were with team members of business, design architecture, development and the client.

Tool implementation

We implemented Zeplin to organized and shared the different cell mockups sections to all the areas members. This facilitated the visualization of last versions and communication through comments of new requirements.

Design System

Profuturo has style guidelines documents that need to be followed in all processes. Unfortunately, some were getting lost in the process because they were not clear to all. Screens that were created before our arrival had different styles and designs, standardize all screens was being chaotic. We decided to implement atomic design by creating a design system based on the existent style guidelines to efficient the work, share a visual guide, increase quality and reduce the time in delivery.

BPM & JAVA

Platform is compound of two different type of screens: JAVA & BPM. For each type we created a detailed design system with components: Inputs, Labels, Buttons, Alerts, Tabs, Icons, Dropdown, Selectors, etc…

*Due to confidentiality agreement I cannot share the detailed design systems.

UX Area Management

In July of 2020, my team of three reduced to one. I became the only designer in the project, therefore the one in charge of the 21 cells and the UX area. Although it was a big challenge I improved my management, organization and responsibility skills. My designer role activities remained but also I acquired new lead functions, like direct communication with the principal managers, workload monthly reports and estimation of work efforts with each area leaders.

For my own organization I used Excel to have control of the task requirements, I uploaded my cards to Jira and managed my activities in a Kanban board. For last, I did a monthly progress/status report for each cell with a graph of requirements I accomplished, and the incoming work for the next month.

Conclusion

Two constant questions that passed through my head were: How can we designers change the perspective of what a designer role within a company is? How can we teach others that UX design is more than generating screens?

During my journey in Profuturo, I realised design can make a big impact on how different involved areas co-work. Designers can teach and help others understand what the role does by facilitating small changes in daily routines that with time will transform into important mindset changes.

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