Design Leader's Portfolio - Case Study
While my focus is predominately on team building and design strategy, I continue to maintain my abilities in user experience design. In my day to day I focus on process, workshops, and design reviews. I mentor and support my team, sharing best practices, leveraging tools like assessments and user research to create a high-performing engaged team. As a servant leader, I empower designers to achieve excellence and drive positive outcomes.
So what does that mean for a design leader's portfolio? I showcase how I conduct research, how I mentor designers in the design process, design systems. I iterate and produce a broad range of ideas on motivating and keeping designers engaged.
Design Systems
One of my strengths as a design leader is providing strategy and framework for the adoption of design systems within an organization. Design systems are important to software development for several reasons:
Consistency: Design systems maintain consistency in the design language, user experience, and overall brand identity.
Efficiency: Design systems create efficiently by providing pre-existing components, patterns, and guidelines. A measurable time savings.
Scalability: As products grow, design systems ensure scalability by providing a centralized repository of design elements and assets.
Collaboration: Design systems facilitate collaboration with developers. This aligns everyone within the process and ensures visibility..
Maintenance: A well-established design system is simplifies product updates over time, reducing technical debt.
Veritone
Veritone had an existing design system but it was not fully adopted by engineering or design. My contributions produced quality and standardization. I provided strategy and vision to redesign and extend the design system beyond Figma mockups. Partnered with Sr Software Engineers, we built React UI component libraries. Using the latest techniques we aligned products within the existing portfolio and enabled rapid adoption by seven engineering teams using Storybook.
How the design team used Storybook to improve processes with engineering:
Component Library: Centralized library of UI components compiled at build time
Testing and Documentation: Environment for UI testing and documenting
Collaboration: Brought together designers and software engineers in collaboration and reviewed components
Accessibility Compliance: Product design compliance, WCAG, and front end development standards met
Multi-Org Design System
As a stakeholder and design leader in CCA, I was instrumental in the development of the GM design system. My responsibilities included:
Participating in the strategy and planning phases to ensure that CCA goals and objectives were represented
Collaborating with other UX teams, including GSMC, GPSC, Manufacturing, Quality, and GMIT.
Team participation in maintaining design patterns and guidelines, ensuring consistency in design across CCA products
Providing training and support to designers and engineering on the use of the design system
Evangelizing the design system internally, promoting its adoption and driving its success
With business goals and project timeline, it's important to strategize on how much user research nets enough understanding to make good products. There are a number of tried and true practices to understanding users. I will showcase a couple techniques. The first example are a user persona and a user journey map. These design artifacts were for a design challenge on a pizza delivery mobile app.
