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

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

Imagine you’re responsible for providing services to a stakeholder—whether you’re working for an agency or within an inside group. To win the stakeholder’s business, your value proposition must make your services more attractive than those your competition provides. This is a pretty typical situation for those of us who are responsible for business development—whether external or in house.

In Part 2 of this series, I presented a tutorial for creating a spreadsheet that helps you transparently scope, estimate, and reconcile services in a way that puts your customers in control of the scope of effort. In doing so, I defined the five basic steps that are necessary to build this tool:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables.
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More