Starting a UX team
Background
Tracerco is a provider of diagnostic services and measurement equipment to process industry and is traditionally engineering-led in its product development. Whilst working as a software engineer in 2017, I became interested in the growing field of UX. Having always been interested in the details of user interaction, I was convinced of the need to bring a user-centred approach to product development in our organisation.
I have been leading a small in-house UX team since 2020 and have progressively built upon early success to the point where we now have UX embedded as a key part of multiple product development projects. We cover work from early stage product ideation and user research through to detailed user interface design and deployment.
Making the case
During my role as software engineer, I used personal development time to research and experiment with some practical UX techniques. This involved some successful demonstrations of the value of usability testing with real end users. I also promoted the use of user interface design tools like Axure RP to show the value of early design prototypes within the software development lifecycle.
After a promotion to manage the electronic and firmware development team, I was able to continue to make the case for product design more broadly. I used creative facilitation tools to promote cross-functional collaboration work in the early part of projects, running the the first of a number of Design Sprints as the catalyst for new projects.
In July 2020 I pitched the idea of creating a dedicated UX team within the product development team to build on these capabilities and moved into the role of UX Manager, initially as a the business’ only designer.
Learning and adapting
Early on, I focussed on trying a number of design activities to promote the value UX could bring. This included customer journey mapping for a number of business areas. I found reporting on and presenting this work assisted with early business buy-in.
The first major project I worked on was for the PED2 Personal Dosimeter. This project provided an opportunity to design a product experience from inception to release.
Getting started was not without difficulty and there were a number of challenges to overcome:
Building relationships with product owners and product decision makers
Establishing trust with colleagues to enable access to real customers and end users
Working out how to insert design deliverables into existing engineering processes
Building trust with several engineering teams to encourage collaboration and promote user-informed decision making
Growing and increasing maturity
During the first year, I advocated for expanding the UX team in order to bring a depth of experience and to diversify the type of work we were able to cover concurrently. In 2022 I was able to recruit our first early-career UX designer and have since been responsible for:
Day-to-day line management
Mentoring and personal development
Performance management
Work allocation, planning and prioritisation
Increasing UX capacity allowed for more focus on strategic efforts to build our capability including:
Increasing UX’s role in software backlog development and Scrum process
Improving design consistency through a design system and promoting software UI management tools
Advocating for UX’s role in early product development and opportunity evaluation
Building the case for dedicated user research capabilities (ongoing)
Successes and learning
From a successful product started through a Design Sprint to a launched SaaS product with UX through its whole lifecycle, I’ve been able to show design’s impact on our business. Whilst there is always more work to do, the UX team has been successful in the following ways:
All software projects now consult with UX or have dedicated design resource
UX facilitated creative workshops are in demand for ideation and exploration from the early stages of a project
Design roles are now integrated with software’s Scrum process and user feedback is regularly implemented
There remain a number of challenging things I had been working on to improve including:
Access to direct users can be challenging in an industrial B2B environment, working with large complex businesses
Co-ordinating and communicating design intent across multiple engineering teams
Advocating for high quality experiences when balanced against difficult project delivery challenges
See more of my work
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Building a design system
How I built our organisation’s first design system in order to promote consistent experiences between multiple web platforms.
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Facilitating design sprints
A case study of a cross-business, international, design sprint which kicked off a successful digital service project.
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Remote instrument health
A web-based, life-time service enhancement for installed industrial instrumentation. Saving customers from costly engineering call-outs and process shutdowns through remote data sharing.
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PED2 - Radiation protection
A second-generation of a popular body-worn radiation detector with an ambitious aim of embedding the detector within a SaaS platform aimed at team radiation safety.
