Business: DesignOps

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More

As respect for design as a competitive advantage grows, companies are tackling the challenge of integrating design practices into enterprises and digital businesses. DesignOps is an emerging strategy for addressing this challenge. The UX community is now exploring best practices for operationalizing and scaling in-house design.

DevOps is an IT methodology for designing and operating complex IT systems and organizations. DevOps addresses the question of how to build and run sociotechnical systems that can scale without becoming brittle. Understanding the DevOps approach can help the UX community think more broadly and systematically about what it means to scale design.

DevOps and DesignOps are both responses to the same underlying phenomenon. We are living through a transition from an industrial economy whose focus was physical products to a post-industrial economy that centers on digital services. This post-industrial business economy isn’t just about making digital products instead of physical ones. It’s about integrating the physical and digital realms with one another—infusing each with the other. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to integrate UX practices with a continuous-delivery approach. First, our expert panel considers the company’s goal: continuous delivery or delivering meaningful outcomes? They then discuss how advances in DesignOps can help in this situation. Finally, our experts provide several tips on working within a continuous-delivery pipeline.

Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected]. Read More