UXINDIA16- Change by Design – A Woman-Centric Way of Driving the Design Culture ( Prachi Sakhardande ) by uxindia

Men and women leaders share many common leadership attributes. However, women through ages have got hardwired with abilities of observation, collaboration, patience and perseverance. Call it nature’s way of ensuring survival of the species, but it is these attributes that lend themselves beautifully to the credence of Design Thinking. What is Design Thinking, after all, if not the ability, to observe, connect, interpret and internalize?

This talk focuses on my learnings as a woman who has traversed through several roles, as an Interaction Designer, UX lead and then as the Product Experience Lead at one of India’s foremost IT Service companies. Through my journey, I realized that everywhere we go, the organizational obstacles that we face to delivering good design are somewhat common. As my own understanding of Design Thinking matured, I was able to separate the Problem from the Person, conceptualize changes and test prototypes. This is a living experiment, just like life. Here, I share some interesting examples of changes that we brought about in our own approach and how it helped me and my team to entrench Design Culture successfully in our organization.

Transcript

2. Design for Change UXINDIA 2016
3. Prachi Sakhardande Working Mom Design Thinker, Inventor, Customer Experience Champion, Dreamer, Drama Queen Head, Product Experience @ CEG, TATA Consultancy Services Malconsuliumphobia – fear of bad design…trying my bit to eradicate it from the face of the earth! 3
4. As a Woman & a Designer Curiosity, Collaboration & Empathy are inherent in all that we do 4
5. Design Thinking is the Designer’s new BLACK 5
6. The Design Thinking methodology too, has curiosity, collaboration and empathy at its core. 6
7. The DT – Double Diamond 7 Problem Statement High Level Design Brief ? Refined Solution
8. DT is a structured methodology for finding answers to difficult questions Let us look at the kind of questions that often come our way… 8
9. Questions Like… We’ve build the application…can you fix the UI? Can you make it look good?...by tomorrow? Why do you need to talk to users? I’ll tell you the problems! Just fix the colors…why are you asking so many questions? Why wireframes? Just give me the finished HTMLs! What do you mean this needs to be simplified? We will TRAIN them!! 9 DESIGNER
10. The End User Perspective  Context: An Experience Design Team in a large, conservative IT – company  Service Consumers – Tech Leads, Project Managers, Developers  User Research  Customer Satisfaction Surveys  Root Cause Analysis  One on one discussions, in – person meetings  Collaborative workshops / focus groups 10
11. 11 Problem Statement ?
12. The Problem Statement Design is a microcosm in a larger engineering centric world of IT companies. As long as it is considered mysterious mumbo - jumbo, Design and Designers will be treated as Others. How then can we bring in more transparency, structure and openness and create a symbiotic relationship with the larger IT community? 12
13. Drawing on our experiences, and inputs from our colleagues in engineering and product management, we came up with a series of possible solutions These solutions are in a Perpetual Prototype phase, continuously being improved and iterated 13 ?
14. What has worked… Transparency Involvement Evolution 14
15. Transparency in Methodology Quality Metric 15
16. Methodology  Effort Estimation – Toolkits and BallParks  SLAs, handshakes and sign off mechanisms  Creating Traceability – From Requirements to Test Cases and beyond 16
17. Quality: Invested in creating frameworks to bring in objectivity to UX Quality Measurement  User Experience Maturity Assessment[US Patent]  Visual Design Quality Assessment Model [Patent Pending]  Application Lifecycle Management tools for defect tracking and analysis  UI Testing Automation 17
18.  Selection of the right Metric during the Requirement phase. Usability Tests – Staggered over time Web Analytics Voice of Customers Net Promoter Score 18
19. Involvement Partnership & Collaboration Enablement Sustained Mentoring 19 - Cultivating Product Experience Champions in every team we work with - Working alongside the Product Manager in every Agile Sprint - Empowering non designers with guidelines, checklists, digitizing design guidelines into plug and play components - Formal training WBTs, instructor led sessions and hands – on mentoring - Fostering an environment of trust, collaboration and kinship
20. - Facilitating Innovation through Design Thinking workshops - Mystery shopping expeditions to assess service quality on-the-ground - Customer Experience Assessments - Service Design, IVRS scripts, Space Design - Investment in Research and Innovation: Zero UI, Conversational, Gestures, Wearables, IoT, AR, VR, SASS, MDL, Angular, REACT, D3 Evolution Staying Relevant - Doing whatever it takes to design Great Experiences 20
21. Own the entire PRODUCT EXPERIENCE Product – Intrinsic Qualities Services Around Product 21
22. I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better – Abraham Lincoln 22
23. Thank You BE THE CHANGE! 23