Crescendo Collective
In the fast-paced world of agencies, it's common to work on numerous projects across various industries and distributed teams. Having a well-established design process is crucial for success.
Design Systems
The primary benefit of design systems are their ability to replicate designs quickly by utilizing premade UI components and elements. Since simpler UI elements are created already and reusable, designers can focus less on tweaking visual appearance and more on more-complex problems.
Our team optimized the product design cycle by leveraging a custom design system to streamline the wireframing and prototyping process. By employing Adobe XD links and conducting regular stand-ups, our geographically dispersed team effectively communicated and iterated on projects.
Furthermore, utilizing a design system enabled us to craft a cohesive and consistent user experience throughout the site, maintaining brand identity across diverse elements such as landing pages, articles, and emails.
Prior to adoption...
Project Recommendations
Taking a holistic approach to strategy and design can help ensure that the end product meets the desired goals and provides a seamless user experience. While creating a design system is a great starting point, it is important to continually evaluate and improve the design through user analytics, identifying unique selling propositions, and design for a cohesive experience across the entire site.
By gathering data on user behavior and preferences, designers can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. This can help to inform the design process and ensure that the product meets the needs of the target audience.
In addition, it is crucial for designers to work closely with developers to ensure that the design is accurately translated into code. Conducting regular reviews of the code against the design can help to identify any discrepancies and ensure that the final product aligns with the design specifications.
By incorporating these recommendations into the design process, the team can create a product that not only looks great but also provides a seamless and effective user experience.
“My job as a UX designer is to question assumptions and dispel “self-evident” truths to steer companies towards a UX-driven culture. My success depends on my ability to make other people successful.”
Defining the Problem
Teams must be given problems to solve, not solutions to build. The right way is to understand and express the problem that stakeholders or clients are trying to solve.
Customer Success:
A Metric Everyone Shares
Customers succeed when they achieve the result we promised them with as little hassle as possible. Because each functional area is accountable for a different set of metrics, conflict often arises.
Remember we all share a common goal, even if we disagree on how to achieve it.
Design plays a crucial role in identifying pain points and solving user problems. By using various design techniques, such as user research and prototyping, designers can gain a better understanding of the users' needs and pain points. This helps to ensure that the end product not only meets the desired metrics but also delivers real value to the users.
Conducting user research enables designers to identify potential issues and gather insights that can guide the design process. By observing how users interact with the product, designers can uncover areas that need improvement and make adjustments to enhance the user experience. Through iteration, designers can align the design with user needs and ensure that the product is meeting the desired metrics.
The Four-Legged Stool
As a manager the most rewarding site your will ever see is the Four-Legged Stool gathered around the UX Designers screen collaborating on a design.
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Product Manager
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Product Owner
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Lead Developer
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Lead UX Designer
Visioning and road mapping must not be the exclusive domain of the product manager, we must tap into the intrinsic knowledge of each department to solve business problems.
While visual design is subjective and does not inherently provide metrics for success, it can still serve as a valuable tool for problem-solving and achieving optimal solutions.
In addition, creating a well-structured site map and work flow can help to streamline the design process and ensure a cohesive and effective end product. By thoughtfully considering the user journey and strategically mapping out each step, designers can more effectively tackle complex challenges and arrive at successful outcomes.
Development and Design
Developers are just as creative as designers and find it rewarding to discover ingenious solutions. Rework is painful.
Designers and Developers teaming up to create a design system with attached code libraries makes the design and development process more efficient.
One of the challenges we encountered during the project was the lack of access to concurrent work being done by the client or other agencies, which posed a potential roadblock to our design process. While high fidelity wireframes are typically recommended, in this case we recognized that the articles would be automatically populated into the system via an API once written by the ADA, thus rendering wireframes less relevant. Our focus therefore shifted towards ensuring optimal system functionality.
To address this challenge, I maintained consistent communication with our skilled development team to ensure seamless integration of our designs within the CMS, as well as alignment with wireframes approved by the client. By collaboratively designing a mid-fidelity prototype that accommodates automatic data integration, we successfully delivered a functional product in a shorter time frame.
