scale up time at ZIVVER
CONTEXT
ZIVVER is a fast-growing scale-up offering secure email and data transfer solutions.
I joined as a Senior UX Designer to help formalize some design processes and improve the capacity of UX to bring business value.
The company is 5 years old. Looking at a UX maturity model bellow, they were more in a stage 2 - there was some design to ‘make pretty’, usually after or at the same time as coding, a little interaction design and no UX research or testing. The development process was not formalized around user centered practices either.
UX maturity levels (source: 6 Indicators of an Organizations User Experience Maturity Level)
What activities would bring UX maturity up? How do you create sustainable UX processes where there are none?
I worked closely with developers, QA, product owners and the other half of our fantastic UX team of two.
To make the company’s value creation efforts more effective, we grew a shared understanding of our customers across stakeholders in the organization, and aligned efforts with other teams. With that goal in mind, we run workshops, did presentations, found creative ways of socializing user research and feedback, and introduced design thinking
It was the first time for ZIVVER doing
Alignment personas
Empathy Maps
Jobs to be done
User Journeys
User interviews
Design Sprint
Improved User Flows
Socializing Research
Service Blueprinting
Design System groundwork
UX Metrics
Accessibility audit
One of the first steps was to map the ZIVVER ecosystem of products and share that through the company, so that we could align around the language we used internally and have a better understanding of touchpoints. From then on, we started aligning stories across products. A design system is a perfect tool for this.
I started auditing the component for a design system and led the efforts towards consistency and simplicity by reducing and unifying the color palette across the products. Before, changing a colour took 6 hours, there were over 600 inline code references. After implementing the new - and accessible - colour palette, it takes 2 minutes to change a colour, all references are in one source.
Facilitating a service blueprinting workshop with Enterprise Services (the team that works on implementations with large customers) was a lot of fun. The workshop created shared understanding, especially since members of this team do not often sit together. Pain points and opportunities became clear, the blueprint is very useful now in on-boarding new members and for current members to take ownership of the process.
Information architecture starts at home. On my own initiative, I redesigned and rebuilt the company’s internal page. If our own flows are easier and simple, we are more likely to be easier and simple towards our users.
I worked with team leads, content collaborators and the scaling officer to build an internal site that would scale, be easy to use and update, and where information can be easily found by new and old users alike.
Measuring the ZIVVER guest experience - direct user feedback first iteration
User insights can be applied to daily decision making by everyone.
Easy socializing of research - Print and paste around the office.
To learn more about my work at ZIVVER