DECEMBER 2020CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8In My Viewiaodan has 20 years of industry experience as a user experience design leader. She has worked for multinational companies, unicorn start-ups and consulting firms, and has built 6 international multidisciplinary design teams in Europe, Asia and the US. She is an expert in cross organization collaboration, product & design innovations and agile development. She is passionate about getting talented individuals together to build something bigger and better than each could alone. Xiaodan has been a guest speaker at various international industry events, a freelance writer and photographer. She has written for 20+ design, travel and lifestyle magazines including National Geographic Traveler, Art & Design, Marie Claire etc. Her book <China Contemporary> was published in 2008 with UK publisher Thames & Hudson. OverviewWhatever our jobs are, most of us want to work in a world class team. But what does it mean to be world class in the user experience design world? And why does it even matter whether your company has a world class design team or not?Having worked in a global context as a user experience leader, I have observed some key ingredients for building a world class design teams, there are of course other factors to consider:1. Cognitive diversity 2. Craftsmanship & process3. Communication & collaboration.Why does it matter? Better designs drive better business outcomes.Cognitive diversityBuilding a top notch design team starts with understanding your business and industry. What business goals are you trying to achieve? What design disciplines are required to enable these business objectives in your industry? For example, Grab, a ride hailing unicorn start-up in Southeast Asia, wants to be the Everyday Everything App that connects millions of consumers to millions of drivers, merchants, and businesses. To enable such ambition, a conventional User Experience (UX) design team of visual & interaction designers is not enough because it does not offer full innovation capabilities the company needs. We needed a multidisciplinary innovation powerhouse that could materialize and validate product concepts to completion, from native mobile experiences for passengers & drivers, to wearable products for safety motorbike rides & food deliveries, to architecture & interior design for driver centers, to service design for in-car physical riding experience, to enterprise solutions for corporate users, etc. To acquire such complex capabilities, we need multidisciplinary diversities in the team set up: visual designers, interaction designers, industry designers, service designers, content strategists, user experience researchers, UX engineers, architects, design program managers and so on. These cognitively diversified professionals work coherently to ideate concepts, to build prototypes, to validate with users, and to achieve business goals. Craftsmanship & processDesign is a commercial creation process. Like any industry that creates a product, quality matters. That's why luxury brands generate higher profits; their products are finer and usually last longer. Birkin bags are great examples. Its value appreciates over time due to quality and limited quantity. This is applicable in the digital product space. A better thought through user flow and end to end product experience, a more refined visual and emotionally delightful experience will attract and engage more users, hence more business success. Facebook's Instagram is a great example. It is visually appealing, intuitive to use and emotionally satisfying, somewhat addictive. There is only one way to create fine craft - that is to find top talent and inspire them to be part of your business. By looking at design portfolios, follow Dribble accounts, finding out who is behind your favorite products, you can usually identify good designers. Good interaction designers will consider all possible product solutions and narrow them down to the 1 or 2 best options. They can offer design rationales to every question you may have. Good visual designers have amazing aesthetic tastes and are meticulous with details: colors, typography, illustrations, iconography, spacing, animations, transitions are all pixel perfect. And pixel perfect is actually a thing - as trained artist and designer, if you misalign something by a couple of pixels on the screen, I can tell, that comes from years of training.Over the past 20 years, within my teams and teams I worked directly with across the world, just over a dozen designers I could recall as world class (far less world class product managers, that's another story). Without exceptions, with such talent, these designers seek meaning in what they do. We have always worked together wanting to create something beautiful and make this world a better place - this is the foundation of attracting top talent, coupled with top pay. However talent alone don't always yield results, rigorous processes do. Best practices of building successful designs fast are prototyping, user research, deck check, bug bashing, iterative release planning and performance data review. User research should be done on a weekly basis, every feature XBUILDING WORLD CLASS DESIGN TEAMSXIAODAN WANG, PRODUCT DESIGN DIRECTOR, FACEBOOK
< Page 7 | Page 9 >