#jared spool

It’s one thing to say design is important and to put phrases like “delivering best-of-class customer experiences” into the corporate mission statement. It’s another thing to change a corporation to truly make design a competitive advantage.

Infusing design into the corporate culture means making hard changes. Cutting out traditional ways of doing business. Building the capability to seek out radical opportunities that will change decades-old thinking about how business gets done.

These are intentional activities. They are designed. Design isn’t just about manipulating pixels on the screen. It’s about rendering our intent.

Did your team launch an exciting, comprehensive redesign, only to experience...disappointment? It may seem counter-intuitive, but Flip-the-Switch redesigns turn out to be the most ineffective way to get major changes into a design.

Overburdened by corporate politics and huge expectations of amazing improvements the moment the new design is launched, large redesigns often promise too much to too many different shareholders.

But part of the problem comes with the attitude of having a single moment when you’ll launch the new thing. When we single out a particular date when all the changes will be realized, shareholders all jump on the bandwagon. This is bad for our workload and bad for our shareholder expectations.

So what’s the secret to a successful relaunch? Rolling out changes incrementally instead of “flipping the switch.”

As organizations develop design-driven practices, how and when UX strategy teams are brought into the process is critical. Some product teams bring UX in early enough to make a difference, while others may not understand the full value of what a UX team offers. When UX is brought in too late, after a design is final, they are limited in what they can do.

Educate product teams on the value of bringing in UX early to troubleshoot solutions that inform the design and product development. If the product team is neglecting UX, or bringing them in too late to make a difference, UX teams should consider the value of saying, “No.” It’s a tricky thing to do, and teams will need support at the executive level to do it. But it sends a message to organizations that they need to practice what they preach if they want to be committed to creating better designs that focus on the user experience.

The tools, techniques, and knowledge that we apply to our work as designers is constantly changing and evolving. It can be hard for seasoned professionals to keep up. Most of the skills that designers need can’t be learned in school. So, what do entry-level professionals do if they want to achieve?

New professionals and students need to adapt their knowledge to an ever-changing field and develop a disciplined approach to staying on top of the industry. Skills are learned on the job, and some fields, like financial systems, government agencies, and medicine, demand industry-specific approaches and solutions.

Center Centre is a new UX Design school that tries to meet these challenges by providing workshops with industry experts, and hands-on work in real-world projects with companies and non-profits. It also offers a collection of the latest resources and tools that will be used on the job. It’s a school that focuses on practical, immediate applications in the design field while emphasizing the importance of developing a lifelong practice of being curious, asking questions, and learning along the way.

Once upon a time, paper prototypes were amazing, radical tools that could predict the future. You could come in on Monday and start sketching and have a full working design in front of users by Friday. Don’t laugh. Until paper-prototypes came along, teams could take up to six weeks to get that far.

By 2004, developers had discovered—and embraced—agile. It gave them the ability to move quickly from one iteration to another, testing with users every step of the way.

Ten years later, responsive design rules, and there’s no such thing as “one design to rule them all.” Now that you’re working with gestures and touch interfaces, you can’t rely on a small collection of design patterns to handle every use case.

Quick prototypes have always been the answer. And these days, designers and developers have to work together in a way we’ve never seen before. Collaboration helps them get to a better design faster.

If you’re playing the long-game of shifting your organization into one that is more design-driven, you may have to teach your partners how to use your designers as the invaluable resource they are.

There are two scenarios: the initial is that colleagues and other teams don’t understand or see the value of UX. In this case, you should say “yes” to every chance you get to demonstrate it’s value. But, when your colleagues understand the value of UX but don’t honor the process, it’s time to gather executive support and start saying “no.”

Saying “no,” tells the organization that the UX team won’t invest their time in product teams who refuse to follow the benefits of good design practice.

Being clear about your expectations, process, and playbook can help others to work with and play well with your team.