Scaling UX design and user research with DesignOps

scaling-ux-design

Most users don’t have the time or the patience to stick around for you to improve your UX design. And when your competitors offer similar products that continually deliver better UX, it’s game over for you.

Building the level of brand and product loyalty required to increase your customer retention involves figuring out user-specific product requirements to improve overall experiences. 

Remember, providing positive experiences is the best path for businesses to define the user website journey and increase product desirability and performance. 

DesignOps, once considered a means to provide design-led businesses a slight edge over competitors, is now a far more prominent factor affecting UX performance and scalability. In numerous cases, companies with fully integrated DesignOps practices are ahead of the competition by leaps and bounds in terms of scalability, product utilization, capabilities, ease of use, and efficiency. 

That begs the question – how can you benefit from adapting DesignOps to your UX teams at scale?

Scaling UX Teams

Scaling UX often complicates design system processes, hindering team performance and design maturity. DesignOps has been integral in managing scaling UX design teams by focusing strategically on team members and their varying skill sets.

Finding and building the right skillsets

Design teams are only as strong as the collective, collaborative abilities that design and non-design stakeholders exhibit toward achieving common goals. 

Creating a desirable workplace requires excellent design culture and streamlined processes that lure highly skilled talent. 

DesignOps interestingly focuses on hiring the right talent with the optimum skills necessary for the product. This recruitment approach allows businesses to simplify and standardize the team requirements to a high level where companies can use the right metrics to gauge what skill sets the current design teams lack. 

This helps businesses arrive at a comprehensive understanding of what crucial product-specific skill sets to seek from recruits.

 

Implementing PeopleOps

PeopleOps is an employee management function within DesignOps in charge of training, developing, engaging, and retaining staffers. 

This essential function trains people while strategically structuring teams for the best UX and UI outcomes. PeopleOps also synergizes how design teams and external stakeholders work with one another.

PeopleOps is central to increasing workplace productivity for scaling UX design teams.

 

Scaling UX Work

Now that we explored how DesignOps benefits scaling UX teams, let’s dive into what DesignOps can help your business achieve when scaling UX work to keep design processes from breaking.

 

Building and standardizing design processes and activities

A UX roadmap is a well-planned approach to creating themes, setting goals, gathering inputs, and setting realistic promises. Some common UX scaling problems that enterprises face are misalignments, miscommunications, redundancies, and roadblocks in the workflows. 

Roadmaps mitigate these problems by taking a step-by-step approach toward establishing goals, gathering the right inputs, creating and prioritizing themes, and keeping stakeholders updated with changes in the organizational goals increasing the UX design impact.

 

Enabling and integrating ResearchOps for better user research

User research is a core functionality of a DesignOps platform that helps businesses standardize research methodologies, optimize recruitment, maintain ethical conduct, and keep stakeholders updated on research impact. 

Scaling UX work can primarily benefit from the right user research with the help of ResearchOps systems as it helps optimize people, craft, research, and processes to create a more significant impact at scale.

 

Building research repositories for UX insights

A common problem businesses face while scaling UX work is placing information, research, and actionable insights in silos that are not shared adequately amongst teams. 

Adding to the problem, retrieving this information is often a tedious process that results in workflow disruption. 

To counter that, a UX research repository holds all research, past and present reports, insights, and additional valuable information in a readily accessible single source. Research repositories are important functions of DesignOps that helps identify and understand the user’s tendency to pay for a product to perform optimally.

In most cases, research repositories help teams generate actionable UX feature insights that can further increase the product desirability with the user.

 

Collating UX platforms for collaboration

Sidelining team collaboration is not a good practice when aiming to excel at UX design. The most effective way to get the best out of design teams is to leverage all UX tools available to help create a seamless, collaborative, and transparent experience for all organizational members. 

It also empowers teams by providing a single language for all communicative needs. 

Cubyts’ platform houses all the tools required to match your UX collaborative demands in one user-friendly platform. Our DesignOps platform can help you instantly improve UX design processes to provide superior user experiences.

 

Scaling UX Impact

The need to provide the best UI and UX design is prevalent in a world increasingly dependent on technology and handheld devices. For this, scaling the impact of the UX design process is paramount to yield and scale insights quicker and more efficiently. 

Here are some of the immediate benefits that DesignOps provides businesses seeking to scale their UX impact.

Defining quality design

Relieving designers from process complexities and providing a simplified working environment is how most successful product companies achieve the high-quality design. 

This simplification allows designers to focus on designing rather than getting distracted by complex systems and processes. 

DesignOps helps accomplish this by effectively regulating design elements, processes, practices, and guidelines and making them easily accessible to teams. Through a smoother design system, designers can improve product quality and effectively manage the rising demands of present and future UX design.

Measuring UX design impact

The need to stay ahead of the competition is a perpetual requirement for most businesses. Product success largely depends on the level and effect of UX that companies provide their users. 

DesignOps helps achieve this by providing the right frameworks to assess the impact of design on UX regularly. 

Businesses engaging in DesignOps practices can now rely on feature-specific metrics, KPIs, and user-friendly dashboards to consistently have an overview of the UX design impact on your users. 

It also helps identify and mitigate any shortcomings and problematic features in the product’s design to maintain the optimal level of the UX design process consistently.

Enabling individuals outside the UX team

Design maturity depends largely on enabling a cohesive workflow between all design and non-design functions. Creating an ecosystem where internal teams and external stakeholders are well integrated is an excellent approach to increasing UX performance and achieving targets. 

DesignOps helps businesses transform how design teams collaborate with other functions to achieve shared goals.

 

How Cubyts can help you

The Cubyts DesignOps platform aims to help businesses leverage ResearchOps and PeopleOps to achieve the best UX design teams and work at scale. 

We aim to help companies orchestrate the best DesignOps system that streamlines your entire design process. Through our design lifecycle management solutions, you can eliminate all workflow redundancies and complexities to surpass competitor user experiences. 

Our design repository helps promote predefined best practices while creating organization-wide transparency. Request a demo with us to see how our platform could be the solution you need to scale and amplify your design.