Design Management

Design, Project management and strategy when rolled into one you get Design management. The responsibility of a design manager can vary, but definitely she/he needs to be able to wear multiple hats within the wide spectrum of design process: Requirement gathering to Delivery & maintenance. They need to also help the organisation acknowledge the importance of CX & UX. 

User experience design is the need of the hour as numerous digital products are blending into our routine lives. UX has branched out to create multiple niche roles like UX researcher, UX-UI designer, UX writer, UX strategist etc. But we often see UX leads shy away from connecting dots with business and tech teams. Even in design institutions, we are usually taught to think in depth within one arena and miss out on adding modules on business development / stratergy / communication. Service design comes very close to understanding business and tech, since it plots all the actors/ stakeholders within the service. That is how I stumbled into Design management, very organically, naturally.

I was no different from my UX peers, who are devoted to design thinking & idol design process. Designers don’t want to get into technical details and let it disturb/define the project. But then I had a day in my designer life when my tech team needed my help in creating sequence diagram. Sequence diagram is “A Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram that illustrates the sequence of messages between objects in an interaction. A sequence diagram consists of a group of objects that are represented by lifelines, and the messages that they exchange over time during the interaction". Well but we were aiming to do more than that. Our sequence diagram needed to be simplified, with little technical terms and more detail mapping towards what is happening as front stage action. Almost a hybrid service blueprint but with all the back end layers defined, for a business to understand and sign off. Generally a sequence diagram is generated automatically and doesn’t involve manual whiteboarding. But when we are still in discovery and design stage, the systems are not in place and you need to put your thoughts together, a whiteboard(in this case miro) comes to rescue. We put together all the information from various verticals of the team Technical, Data, Front end misc and aligned every UI-UX interaction with the back stage / backend processes . It ended up being a weeklong exercise and a lengthy detailed diagram. This exercise helped us understand that great amount of the UX process is tied up with the backstage process and understanding the backstage technology also gives you an opportunity perform UX analysis from a advanced perspective. 

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“Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better.” - Dieter Rams. A quote that is imbibed in the practice of every good designer. This tends to go a long way in solving some complex backstage processes as well.

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The product you can design and develop when UX and backend are in sync is definitely a better way of engineering. It's time for the UX designers to end the constant battle they have with technology and developers and start working together harmoniously to solve each others problems. This also will invoke a design understanding in the tech team which will help develop user centric products and in turn develop an organisation who have design thinking and CX embedded within the system.

This post is planned to be in series, considering this S1, please comment your thoughts. We can take the discussion forward on S2. Further topics in design management planned for S2.