Business: DesignOps

Throughout this five-part series, I’ve presented an approach to selling, estimating, and managing services that puts your client in control while letting you maximize your value. Using this approach lets you avoid billing by the hour. You can instead quantize your service offerings—transforming the time necessary to complete a task into a deliverable unit of value. In Part 4, I decomposed an example of a service offering, Craft an IA, into its constituent elements. In a detailed spreadsheet, I illustrated how you can break a single service offering into 24 separate deliverable units—only a few of which relied on hourly charges.

In addition, I discussed how you can leverage this approach to increase your value proposition with your stakeholders. By being transparent about the range and costs of your services with your prospects, you’ll increase their trust in your proposals. Giving your prospects access to your estimating spreadsheet lets you discuss all the possible services you might offer. By working with them throughout the estimating process, you can show that you understand their desired outcomes. By situating each service element within a design-thinking framework, you can help your prospects understand where changes in scope are most likely to occur. In illustrating to your prospects the relationships between your service elements and the larger design-thinking framework, you can communicate both that your approach is rational and logical and that your final scope of effort and resulting costs could likely change. Read More

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