Introduction
Some of the challenges in establishing a new design team within a legacy enterprise culture are the introduction of new processes and procedures to deliver with velocity to the market that shake up the established norms.
As I began to build the product design team within Wyndham Destinations it was evident that the enterprise design culture was non-existent. This was a 50+ year old company that is still using IBM AS400 mainframe computers to power its business operations. Needless to state, the introduction of modern, agile software development processes was a bit of a culture shock for many long-time associates.
Background
Problem
When the company decided to spin off its hotel business and become a solely-focused timeshare company, the decision was made to adopt a more modern, agile-is approach to product delivery across the enterprise. Coming off the recent learnings of a multi-year, $150 million dollar software product that was built in-house, the senior leadership agreed that our approach to web design needed to change.
Solution
I have written about some of the core team members required for a product team here. The next step was choosing tools and initiating processes that allowed iterative, collaborative design while also engaging internal teams for feedback while also providing a window for our customers through user testing.
After researching the multitude of options available, we settled on a few core tools: Bohemian Sketch, Abstract, and InVision App for our initial software set.
Solution
The core of the design team’s toolkit would be Sketch. Sketch is a vector-based application that has been around since September 2010 and quickly gained popularity among product design teams. It is primarily used for user interface and user experience design of websites and mobile apps provides a plugin system that enables a greater collaboration with development partners to help the handoff of designs and assets for coding.
The second package we settled on was Abstract. Abstract at its heart is version control software which allows the traditional check-in/out features for design teams working on projects at scale. However, it also allows review features that enable sponsors to review screens-in-progress tied to tickets, like I wrote about with the dashboard project, but it really shines with handing off assets to developers.
The same link a sponsor can use to review a design and provide commentary allows a developer to actively engage with the design and retrieve ID/Class names for CSS, review size and position of elements, as well as pull hexadecimal color values for code. This negates the need to red-line designs and is a significant time saver for the design team.
The last key application we chose was InVision App. InVision was initially a presentation application for reviews and approvals, but has grown into a suite of design tools as the market has matured. At first, InVision was chosen for that reviews and approvals feature-set for our sponsors but we quickly chose it as a base for our user testing efforts and transitioned all commenting to Abstract.
There are a lot of alternatives for user testing, but many of those require installation of application on a test subject’s computer or mobile device. There were definitely serious limits to what could be accomplished in a prototype within InVision App, but for the customer journey’s we were creating the software was sufficient for the task.
Our key customer is an older demographic and we wanted to ensure it was as hassle-free as possible for our owners to participate in user testing without encumbering them with installation and support of applications they would only use during the tests.
A key feature of all of these applications was that they not only worked for our design team, but also for our extended team of sponsors, partners, and test-subjects. As designs progressed through the maturation, we could easily tie them to JIRA tickets for our product owners to review progress while also develop prototypes to be readied for user testing. As comments and revisions arrived, those designs could be updated, merged back up into Abstract and the prototypes updated in InVision in a seamless process.
Part of the success of any team is the balance of talent on the team and codified roles and responsibilities. Another key part is providing the necessary tools and procedures to allow the design team to work on solving the business problems and not troubleshooting software. This small suite of tools has allowed the team to deliver a new application to our owners that has been tested, iterated, and delivered in less than 9 months, during a pandemic.
The fact that much of these tools operate in the cloud was not their initial value to the company, but once we transitioned to a work-from-home, distributed team the value of our due diligence in establishing clear processes and procedures delivered value for our owners, senior leadership, and our share price.
We continue to review out toolkit and have made some adjustments to the initial procedures based on experience and we expect to move our design tools into Adobe XD in the next 12 months as this single application provides much of what our current set of 3 is handling.