How to evolve digital design teams
Tags: Travel, Design Leadership, Intervew, UX Design, Design Systems

How to evolve digital design teams

How do design leaders stay ahead of the curve, while simultaneously managing their teams and delivering the required design excellence that drives their brands forward?

Continuing our interview series with our clients and friends of Clearleft we speak to Jo Pettett.

Jo Pettett is the Head of Ecommerce at Crystal Ski having previously worked in Service Delivery and Operational Efficiency Management roles there. With a keen head for problem solving and product, Jo has helped shape the digital proposition and service at Crystal Ski by focusing on users and their needs.

Clearleft: If you were only allowed to give one piece of advice to someone beginning a similar role in a sizeable travel firm — what would it be?

Jo: Don’t accept that the historical limitations/barriers around your biggest problems can’t be broken down today. Understand your user pain points and evaluate them all again both technically and creatively.

Clearleft: How much did you have to build the case for design? How did you go about doing it?

Jo: Lots of visualisation of where competitors were doing better, combined with demos of known user pain points (and quoting verbatim feedback that makes you squirm) was a great place to start. Once we acknowledged there were problems to solve and the size of the opportunity, the service design approach was more relevant and therefore easier to discuss.

Clearleft: Which of the decisions that you have made has had the most impact on how design is approached in and across your company?

Jo: I think embedding user testing as part of the design process and being open and transparent in sharing the good, bad and indifferent results has helped educate the wider business on the importance of design. Whilst it is not an exact science, this helps give context and show the impact of the design.

Clearleft: Design can work best when it’s weaved into the fabric of an organisation. Have you broken down traditional barriers to achieving this, if so what worked for you?

Jo: Inviting people from across the wider business — at every level — to offer their insight, opinion and expertise when starting our digital branding and UX review was crucial in showing we were going to be doing things differently now. Then taking key stakeholders in to a design sprint around a core customer journey helped to consolidate lots of opinions in to a design output within a week. We have also done many rounds of internal user testing, so by the end of our current project the majority of the people in our main office will have been involved in one way or another in the process.

Clearleft: How do you measure the value and impact of design?

Jo: Identifying clearly what problem you are trying to solve in the design, helps in identifying how to measure if it has been successful and helps avoid straying from the purpose. AB testing with clearly articulated hypotheses is so important at keeping you honest in your observations.

Clearleft: Many organisations use the services of design agencies. What does a good and a bad agency relationship look like to you?

Jo: I tend to — rightly or wrongly — rely quite a lot on instinct when selecting an agency and visiting each other’s offices helps me to get a feel if it’s going to be a good fit. Combine that with working together to set out the deliverables (output) and dependencies (time, people, location etc) upfront works really well and I think shows both sides if this will be a compatible relationship once you’re past the generic sales pitch.

Clearleft: How has your advocacy and leadership for design thinking benefited you?

Jo: I think by staying true to service design thinking, I am less likely to get distracted by whims or crazes that may take a lot of time and money, and ultimately don’t add real value to the user or the business. By being focused on the user and consistent in the approach, you are far more likely to have successful outcomes — be it conversion, engagement or another.

Clearleft: What do you think is unique about design leadership in travel? Does it bring extra challenges?

Jo: A common challenge for well-established tour operators is selling a complex product on a lot of legacy systems, yet our users and colleagues have expectations of simple digital interactions that they get from providers of more modern or straightforward offerings — AirBNB, Uber, Easyjet etc. You have to find the right balance of innovation and reality, so you can address bigger challenges (technology, culture, structure) whilst still improving the user experience today.

Clearleft: Regarding design within your organisation, how would you like it to be different in 5 years time?

Jo: I’d like to think our design system will have been nurtured and evolved over this time and feel as fresh to the user then as it does today. I hope that our design principles/process will have been embraced by the wider business when thinking about any customer touchpoint/experience and not just in the web/app team.