Getting Design Maturity Inside Orgs: Improving Design Practices

Key tips to Improve Design Practices inside Design Teams and selling proposal to Clients.

In Product Design we all know that things can get complicated when we try to internally manage our several proposals with the team doing a Design Critique or Review Session, even making deliveries with stakeholders and selling those proposals, in this article I will briefly expose several key points that we should consider as Designers to maintain our sanity handling this kind of activities.

This topic is located specifically in the world of Design Ops, very specifically in the core practices of facilitation and improvement of design processes.
Design Operations is a quite broad topic, a good article that reviews this is from Invision called “The New Design Frontier” (Link: https://www.invisionapp.com/design-better/design-maturity-model/).

I mention the subject of Design Ops (Design Operations) because this environment is currently growing very fast with quite specific roles focused on achieving Design Maturity within the Orgs, this is achieved through the improvement of Design processes, which its final outcome is to amplify the impact on deliveries of Design Teams with their Clients.
Design Operations by Nielsen Group(Link: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-operations-101/).

The goal: Getting Design Maturity Inside Orgs : Improving Design Sessions Facilitation inside Design Teams and Clients.

As I said before, the objective is to achieve maturity in Design processes within Organizations (Design organizations), for this we must start from the bottom of the matter, which is summarized in the improvement of basic design practices, I will give some tips that we have used to improve practices and deliveries in two key areas: Improving Critiques with our design team, and improving sessions with Stakeholders when we are selling proposals.

Tips to Improve Design Critiques, Discussing Design:

When we have Critiques or sessions with our internal Design team, we share our proposals (Design in Low or High fidelity) to get feedback from the team, here are some tips on good practices:

1) In first place, if we are presenting our proposal or leading the session, it is good practice to describe the scope of the session including its objectives.

2) Present quickly and efficiently: Do not explain every specific detail of the proposal, try to maintain a balance between the high level and detail explanation, without getting in specific details.

3) Making good questions: Lead with questions about the proposal that can open up new topics and solve other problems that have not been detected in the proposals.

4) Talk about the strengths of the proposal: The sessions cannot only be to talking about the things that are not working, there must be a balance between the positive and the negative, making an honest analysis of what is presented.

5) Think about the perspective: From what perspective is the proposal being analyzed? From the perspective of the user or of another entity or person that interacts?.

What we should avoid in a Critique:

1) Incomplete Arguments: Let’s avoid giving an incomplete opinion without saying why: for example “I could do this here … — end of comment—” .

2) Do not Give preferential feedback: Let’s avoid giving preferential opinions during the sessions, for instance : “I like this component more than other…”.

3) Do not Give directional feedback: In some cases we must avoid giving feedback in the form of direction, that is, a suggestion or instruction of what to do, for example “You should change this component for a drop-down, it is better this way” With this type of feedback the person tries to convey only his vision and expectation of the proposal and is trying to delegate a change in that proposal.

4) Do not Give reactive feedback: It happens when we react to what is presented, that is, our first reaction, its considered as an emotional feedback.

Now some key tips that have helped us improve design practices with our clients:

1) Make a deep Assessment of the tool or product (whether already exists) or the business logic of what you want to Design: To show and sell good proposals it is necessary to have a foundational base at the time of the meeting with our clients, lack of foundation is a common situation and a consequence would end in exposing a weak arguments to sell our proposal.

2) Show and discuss alternate proposals: With alternate proposals we are able to demonstrate Design decisions are taken in the team which means they have been carefully studied and considered all the possibilities.

3) Eliminate distractions that affect the proposal: Eliminate from the file components or elements that will not be explained, on many cases we leave remains from old artifacts which causes distraction in a work with session with stakeholders, even with our colleagues.

Why the best proposal is not always the one that wins?
-> There are situations where we do not know how to sell it.
-> We do not have enough knowledge about the product or service.
-> We do not know how to communicate what we are trying to solve.

These high-level tips work to improve Design processes with our Designer colleagues and clients, tackles the core practices of facilitation in our work handling proposals and allow us to get more control about our processes. If we want to get the desired maturity we should begin improving our performance in this core basis activities.