Following my last article regarding the UX Community at PwC Luxembourg, we continue our progress and are proud to announce that we launched the first edition of the Design Playbook of our UX Community!
How many times have I had trouble finding methods that have proven to be effective or super fun icebreakers? So, With this experience, I managed to get by with creating folders on my computer, but it would have been easier for me to benefit from a common tool, like a daily facilitator.
It's nice to have pre-made templates, methods and tools in the same place… and not to scour online search tools! At least that's what I tell myself in the context of this project. Hand in hand with my designer colleagues, we thought of a collaboration space for our community (and beyond!).
The interest? For everyone, a gain in autonomy and collaboration. Designing on your own or without asking for the umpteenth time the same information, you gain real independence. And then, what is useful for me, can be useful for others, since we do the same job.
This Design Playbook project is the fruit of our research, which also stems from the creation of our UX community. In a good mood and in the constant search for innovation, I wanted to improve my daily life, and thus, the quality of my colleagues’ worklife - designers or not!
Break the silos!
When launching the community, this initiative was also at the heart of our common project. Our UX Community was Phase 1 and the Design Playbook is now Phase 2. I still hate inertia. I like when things are going forward, with little obstacles or loss of time. That’s why I talked about creating a space that could act like a UX toolbox and more.
And the idea of the playbook design was born!
How does this tool change our life? It is actually intended to change our current way of working. It disrupts the concept of silo while we (designers from the UX community, but from different LoS) do the same work with the same objective: to put the user at the heart of our production.
It is a tool that brings the value of design to the firm, promotes collaboration between each team, saves time and at the end, allows to better share knowledge and skills together.
React effectively!
PwC UX Designers share the same vision about what is the definition of design (understanding people - what are their problems - help humans solve their problems). We are designers because of creativity and our love to solve problems with a focus on listening, and ultimately, do something useful for others. We have common qualities like curiosity, research of new and the desire to convince that a Design approach can be helpful in every issue… But we didn’t have a common sharing space where we could find all the methodologies, tools, templates and other design stuff and this, in an easy and tidy way. Now it’s over!
So okay for the story… but what’s a playbook?
In itself, it is simply an online library. What makes it extraordinary is the systematic and strategic thinking about its design and content, useful for jobs of any size, at any stage - even when time is short. On the strategic side, it is a powerful platform , thanks to the created synergies. For the systematic side, it allows all of us - designers and other curious people - to work in a coherent and organised way.
How did we make it?
For this part, we gave everyone a voice to contribute to the Design Playbook project, which itself, as stated, is part of the whole UX Community project. With my partner in crime Sylvain Le Gac, we interviewed 13 internal designers about:
Knowing who they are
Understanding their needs, their desires and their pain points in their working daily life
Discovering their tools and methodologies
Discovering their knowledges about Design System and Design Playbook
Collecting their opinions about the topic
Our goal was to understand their knowledge about the difference between a Design System, its use and the Design Playbook concept. We also wanted to understand the difficulties and challenges we could face, expectations, benefits and legitimacy in order to give a real vision of this project.
We defined some KPIs to measure the success of its adoption in the community and its success in the firm. The first job was to explain clearly what a Design Playbook is and its benefits. Finding the right balance between the needs and interests of different teams was also a key aspect to keep in mind. This tool must be easy to access and we must communicate around the Design Playbook.
To make this platform easy to navigate and findable, a classic Power Point was not really an option. We wanted something more user friendly that people could access easily. So with the tools at our disposal we created our own Design Playbook using Google Site!
Power of diversity
There is no unique profile for UX with no exclusive characteristics. Within the UX spectrum, you will find a lot of differences that are complementary and this is what creates their collaborative strength cross-LoS. In our firm, we have 6 major skills:
User Experience leadership
Usability evaluation
Information architecture
Interaction design
Technical writing
User interface prototyping
And obviously, each major has its under-skills.
Diversity of skills allows to augment the efficiency of teams. It is also an opportunity to increase mission performance by enabling us to accomplish the required tasks better and faster. On the other hand, it is also an asset to increase our knowledge, both intellectual and technical, by learning from each other.
UX evangelism?
Our Design Playbook is our support for evangelization. What we mean with “evangelization”, is that this tool serves as a spokesperson, mediator and translator between designers but also with our colleagues from other departments. It concerns all people who have nothing to do with UX but who may need our services and the company itself.
An apostle is a person who serves a cause. As designers, our role is therefore to propagate design and its advantages, both inside and outside our company. Inside this Design Playbook is the Word of Design and it therefore acts as a kind of bible, the essential object that acts as a reference.
As Paul van Oijen, a dutch designer, explains in his article What Is Design Evangelism?, we have 4 roles to play:
Be the advocate of our job: the Design Playbook officiates as advocacy. It makes it possible to defend the role of designers both in the development process and in defining the role of design within the organisation.
Educate our pairs: one of the goals of the playbook is also to introduce the Design approach to people curious about effective UX application.The Design Playbook is constructed in such a way as to break down the entire discipline into different blocks of information. By helping other users take ownership step by step, we offer them the opportunity to learn and understand the various processes, deliverables, practices and models that make up the field of design.
Cross-LoS collaboration: evangelising is not the prerogative of a solo rider. Making design an asset in the lives of those around us requires an active contribution to the efforts of everyone. Another thing is to explain who is who, because we're coming from different teams and we all have different skills. Each designer is different and they impact the projects differently.
Inspirer: this Design Playbook thus reduces areas of friction. It is the union of all for the same objective: to ensure that everyone can make their place and take part in the future.
Now, here's the hard job: to keep it alive and share with all new joiners.
And for the last word, through this project, I hope that it will be the spark of exchanges and increasingly collaborative work.