Building the UX Practice at Lucky Beard

There were no UX Methodologies when I began. It was a team UI-focused designers, without product or business strategy. Over a few weeks, I interviewed people from the Product Design team, the Product Management team, Tech and Strategists to feed my reflection. I took away 4 main pain points that needed urgent addressing: we had too UI-Centric Only Designers, we had low UX Methodologies processes, and limited collaboration accross funtions. What I did: after my reflection, I prioritised my thoughts and took ACTION. First of all, the most important thing for me was to make my team more mature about UX Methodologies. I wanted to empower the designers to adopt a fully user-centric approach in their designs. I trained them. I showed them how I approached my project work to give them a first hand understanding of how User Research leads directly to delightful products. Then, I worked with DesignOps to bring more transparency on the Product Developement cycle, and evangelise what we were doing on projects, so that it could be scaled to others. This vastly improved our collaboration. Finally, in order to break the one-size-fits all approach that existed sometimes, I ensured the more creative parts of the design process like brand colours or styling elements were kept once functional wireframes had been user tested and approved.