Leading design evolution of a B2B app

Project management
Design lead
Facilitation
Userlane logo
Button component and typography in the Burrito Design System
problem
  • Historical design debt, from when the product had no stable design team, or experienced design leadership.
  • A plethora of usability issues, design inconsistencies all the way down to font families, and a confusing, outdated, and unscaleable navigation.
  • The growing customer base had expectations of higher design standards.
what i achieved
This was a marathon, not a sprint, as all these efforts were in addition to my regular work as a designer in an Agile squad. They partly overlapped over ~2 years.
UX Health level-up
For 1.5 years, I drove the UX Health project, starting with reviewing the UX status quo of the entire product, proceeding to regular alignment and planning, all the way to executing identified UX improvements.
UX Health Map creation and alignment
  • I conducted a usability review of the entire product and visualised my findings in a holistic information architecture. I also enriched it with existing research and user insights.
  • I facilitated a series of workshops with key product stakeholders to reflect their input on our usability shortcomings. This also helped to build alignment and shared sense of ownership of the project across the entire product team.
Prioritization and monitoring progress
  • Each product section was graded on A-F scale with respect to its UX Health. This let us identify main areas in need of improvements.
  • For each section, I identified quick wins and bigger improvements.
  • We reassessed the UX Health each quarter with the design team to monitor progress.
Planning for implementation
  • I used the Impact-Effort Matrix to prioritize the findings for the design team's quarterly planning of design initiatives.
  • We pushed topics for the product roadmap, but also many smaller improvements -  elements and patterns in need of review or removal, best practices to implement, UI microcopy to rewrite. These also fed into our design system priorities.
  • The smaller items were for designers to drive and negotiate into regular product sprints.
learnings
Thinking in terms of "small improvements" became our way of working. I ensured developers always had a bucket of improvement tickets to pick from during slow downs, so we could continue to enhance the product asynchronously, through a culture of empowerment rather than prescriptive planning.