UX Design at Scale: Infusing Design as a Behavior in Your Organization
By: Workday Design
Tags: Ux Design At Scale, Design, Ux Design Framework, Ux Playbook, Design Systems

UX Design at Scale: Infusing Design as a Behavior in Your Organization

4 approaches we’ve found effective at Workday to show the value of UX.

By Tamara Hale, Principal UX Researcher, Workday

Illustration by Nor Sanavongsay (https://dribbble.com/shots/6007899-UX-Infused-Businesses)

This article is based on a talk that was originally given at Lesbians Who Tech 2018.

In the last few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about design’s coming of age and its expanding role in the most forward-thinking organizations. Those of us working in design have always recognized its potential to influence broader business goals and shape the direction of organizational growth. Lately, influential business thinkers, leaders like John Maeda and organizations such as the Design Council have been adding their voices to this discussion. In particular, this conversation has focused on three aspects of design’s potential: its strategic value, its impact on the bottom line and its function as an integral aspect of product or service development. But how do we realize the full potential of design while dealing with the concrete challenges of UX design at scale in large enterprises?

Before we dive deeper, a note on how we use the term “design” at Workday. We work as an integrated Design team, which means that we recognize and leverage the broad range of design specializations that have emerged in recent years. We have researchers, visual and interaction designers, design technologists, other design operations specialists and content strategists, as well as other roles. When I use the word “designers” here, I’m referring to all of the above. All of us work together toward common goals: to understand our users, and to advocate for great experiences that leverage the best technologies while balancing business needs. Our UX design framework depends on this shared effort.

Design as Strategy

Outside the traditional realm of shaping what a product or solution looks like, we’ve been hearing that the voice of design should also be present in the boardroom.

This is because design can:

Help businesses understand who their customers and users are

Infuse empathy for customers or end-users throughout the organization

Identify the problem space that an organization wants to address

Flip a business problem on its head, revealing completely new ways of framing a challenge

Some research has confirmed the strategic value of design. Findings from the design value index suggest that 10 percent of the Fortune’s top 125 companies have executive-level positions and CEO support for design-centered roles. Other recent studies show that companies with a strong design approach have seen increased revenues and higher total returns to shareholders compared to competitors. Strong design approaches can range from leadership support for design, emphasis on iterative processes, research-based decision-making, shared responsibility for user experiences between teams, and development that is focused not on “products” but more holistic experiences.

The Positive Impact of Design

Designers have long been asked to articulate the impact of their work on a company’s bottom line. Increasingly, research suggests that good design has a positive impact on a company’s revenue. To give one example, the Design Management Institute has shown that over the last ten years international design-driven companies (such as Apple, Ford, Nike, Starbucks, Disney, Steelcase and IBM) have outperformed the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

Design is Integral to the Process

Finally, there is a push to view design as integral to the product development process, and not just something you slap on your technology to make it usable or make it look good. Design is the product.

Reality Check

All these trends are enough to make the heart of a design team soar. The potential of design when given a strategic role is (or should be) intuitive to us. But what are the roadblocks in getting design a seat at the strategy table? Here are a few we have identified:

1. There just aren’t enough designers (and researchers) to go around

Designers are still far outnumbered by other roles in most organizations. The practice of “design” still tends to fall to a particular team or group, but there are rarely enough of them to keep up with the demands for their work. According to some statistics, there are on average five designers for every 100 developers. For researchers, it’s even bleaker, with one researcher for every 100 developers. The designer-developer ratio is one indicator of the maturity of a design organization.

2. Designers are asked to the party too late

One of the biggest pain points we hear from designers and researchers is that, in part because they are a scarce resource, they are invited into important conversations too late to make the biggest impact. All the strategic decisions may already have been made, with little time to course correct. Often, significant resources have already been committed to building something without validating whether the problem being solved actually matters to users or customers.

3. Scaling design is hard

As organizations grow, create more products, enter new markets and expand features, they need ways to scale design. Scaling a design practice is especially hard, but even more important when you have multiple products, locations and acquisitions that all need a consistent user experience.

4. There isn’t a recipe for success

Another big challenge is that there just isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that can be dropped into your organization. Just as organizational cultures differ, so do their design cultures. Organizations also differ in the evolution and maturity of their design practices and teams. The strategy for scaling one design team isn’t necessarily going to work for another. For example, if your designers report in through a product team, growing that team will look different than if your designers report to a centralized design team.

While there are many great resources on managing design team growth, becoming more design-centric isn’t as easy as hiring more designers. An organization as a whole must also adopt a more human-centered design mindset, and not as much advice addresses this thornier problem. While data suggests executive sponsorship increases the visibility and impact of design teams, we know less about what’s needed beyond leadership buy-in.

Our Approach to Scale

Given that scaling design growth is difficult and there’s no recipe for success, how do you infuse design behavior into your organization? How do you elevate and scale design?

At Workday, we’ve tried and tested a few different approaches, and we’d like to share some of our lessons in the hopes that anyone thinking about these problems can learn from them.

Here are four approaches that have worked well for us:

Expanding our definition of design Identifying and supporting our allies Opening our tools Moving beyond territorialism

Expanding Our Definition of Design

We’ve been thinking about design much more broadly than in the past. Organizations need to let go of the notion that design is primarily about what something looks like. If you are conceiving an idea and planning and executing that idea, you are doing design, whether you’re designing a product, service, business process or internal team process.

Even when you think of more traditional design roles, many of those doing what we think of as “design” aren’t designers. At Workday, product managers also make important decisions about the problems we are trying to solve, what our product is or will be and who will be using it.

Finding and Supporting Our Allies

Increasing the impact of design requires identifying the people, like product managers, who are making design decisions, who may be “doing design” in a broader sense and who may be natural allies for a design team. Once identified, you can support those allies and help them sell design to other parts of the organization.

We find that providing our allies with opportunities to learn about design strengthens their empathy for what designers and researchers do, and contributes to stronger partnerships. We offer online training on topics such as conducting user interviews and design thinking fundamentals — tools that reach our colleagues in all locations and allow them to fit design education into their day-to-day work. We also offer in-person, hands-on workshops for colleagues to learn and practice design thinking skills and problem-solving activities.

Most of our trainings are attended by individuals from a broad range of teams across the organization and create new opportunities for learning across Workday. We regularly have other people from the organization tell us “I had no idea user research was so hard” or “We didn’t realize that you had such a nuanced process.” Our program of learning opportunities helps us bring design thinking to the company as a whole.

Opening Our Tools

Design systems get a lot of attention these days, for good reason. In order to keep up with the demand on our design team, we have created and released our own design system to other teams at Workday and the broader community. Workday Canvas is our library of reusable UI components and guidelines for using them. It allows us to manage design at scale for a number of reasons.

First, it provides a single source of truth on UI elements; second, it delivers a “self-service” method of getting access to design elements without the need for exporting and sharing components via one-off conversations.

Third, it offers a shared language to use with other teams, especially developers and product managers. For example, in the past we talked about colors using hex values, which was cumbersome and not intuitive. Now teams can easily point to our Workday “Jelly Belly” color palette; instead of numbers we have “Blueberry” and “Chili Mango.” This easily-accessible reference source has also promoted adoption of our design system and good design practice by other teams.

Fourth, it allows our designers and other teams to save valuable time because they aren’t reinventing the wheel every time a new component is needed. For example, in the past, our designers used to create or approve every single icon that went into the system, even if it was just required in a different color or size. Now, we can use the Canvas design system to ensure consistency across our design and research teams, which are spread between different product areas and geographic locations. The design system provides guidelines on the standards we agree on, allows us to evaluate our work against a common ground, and gives enough flexibility for our experienced teams to be creative, innovative and efficient.

Our Canvas design system serves as the pencils and paper of UX design — the tangible tools required to design — but we also want to teach our allies how to use that pencil and paper. In addition to the Canvas design system, we created guides to help others understand and implement a design process. Our UX Playbook is a set of best practices and easy-to-use activities for how to get great design done, regardless of which department or team someone comes from. They are methods we’ve used to get unstuck, aligned and creative in our problem- solving. They are framed for an entry-level audience, including people who are completely new to design, people working with design partners or more experienced design-minded people. Offering transparency into how we work and showing teams how to use design tools to help them with their work has helped us build credibility and trust with our partners.

Ultimately, sharing our tools allows us to build faster and to increase the cohesiveness and consistency of Workday’s look and feel across all of our products and features. In turn, our designers can spend time on tasks that require more specialized design expertise and increase visibility, acceptance and design sensitivity throughout the organization.

Not only have we shared our tools within our organization, we’ve also released Canvas, together with our Playbook of methods, to the broader community. Workday recognizes that there are partners, developers and community members who are using Workday Cloud Platform to build onto our API and get the most out of Workday. Releasing our tools to the community lets us support these efforts in a way that maintains the look and feel of Workday.

Moving Beyond Territorialism

You may be wondering, if we advocate for a broader definition of design and support non-designers in learning how to use design tools, where does this leave those folks who are trained as designers? We’ve heard concerns from designers about good design being diluted without quality control on good design and research. If design is on everyone’s plate, isn’t the effect of design lessened? Some may even wonder what the role of a traditional designer or researcher might be in the context of these transitions and changes.

Our experience at Workday suggests there are grounds for optimism. We can unequivocally say our design team isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Workday’s design organization has been growing exponentially over the last 5 years, a time frame that coincides exactly with the approaches we’ve outlined above.

In fact, all of the approaches we’ve described have freed up our team to do some of the best work of their careers. It has allowed us to be more selective, strategic and forward-thinking in our work. The avenues outlined above have allowed us to work on bigger, thornier and more complex problems. They have also helped other teams in the organization understand how and when to engage with design.

We’ve talked about the ways in which Workday has tried to infuse design throughout our organization by expanding our language around design, identifying and supporting our allies, opening up our tools and moving beyond territorialism. These initiatives have allowed us to broaden and strengthen UX design at scale at Workday. We are continuing to develop these approaches and are learning lessons about what works and what doesn’t along the way. If you are facing similar to challenges and are thinking about trying out some of these approaches, we’d love to hear from you!