Business: DesignOps

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss the newest discipline within User Experience: DesignOps, which covers the operational aspects of design. Most DesignOps practices have been standard operational practices within software companies for many years—they just weren’t called DesignOps until a couple of years ago, and they did not yet constitute an integrated set of practices.

DesignOps is such a new discipline that the term is still somewhat ill-defined—even though there’s already a conference that focuses on this discipline, the DesignOps Summit, for which 2018 will be its second year, and InVision has just released an ebook on this topic, The DesignOps Handbook. It’s unclear who originally coined the term DesignOps, but there is universal agreement that it was inspired by the term DevOps. This is just the second piece that UXmatters has published about DesignOps. The first was Jeff Sussna’s article “What DesignOps Can Learn from DevOps.”

In this column, our expert panel defines DesignOps, discusses what dimensions the discipline comprehends, and describes DesignOps roles and practices at several leading companies. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel addresses scoping UX projects and what functions are within and outside the scope of User Experience. It seems that the definition of User Experience is constantly expanding. First, our experts discuss how the business community currently perceives the practice of User Experience in relation to their business. Then, we’ll explore some specifics such as:

• defining the scope of the project work an organization need to do
• how to manage change
• matching the skills of team members to the work
• how to accomplish the work within the allocated time and budget

One panelist asks us to consider whether it really matters if something is within the defined scope of User Experience. Read More

Whether you’re doing business development for an agency or an in-house UX group, to win a stakeholder’s business, you must provide a value proposition that makes your services more attractive than those of your competitors. If you’re managing a project, a team, or a business that depends on the delivery of services, it’s essential that you negotiate the project scope and ensure your stakeholders understand what you’ll be delivering before beginning work. It’s also important to reconcile the project scope and track status along the way and to manage costs and stakeholder expectations—not to mention your contractual obligations.

In this article, I’ll describe the approach that I devised for scoping, estimating, and reconciling services at Phase II, an external agency, and have since applied as an internal service provider at Intel and The Home Depot. The scoping and estimating spreadsheet that I created has evolved over the years and now accounts for a far broader range of services than it did initially. My work, whether at Phase II or as an internal service provider has always focused on B2B (Business to Business) applications—meaning I am serving clients who have clients of their own. This is an important perspective to keep in mind. In a B2B context, your clients need to know the costs of services they’ll incur as quickly and transparently as possible, so they can, in turn, manage their change orders with their client. Read More