Creating the design space
The challenge
The day I had my first interview last year, I clearly understood 1account needed help but not only with creating new clean UIs and setting up consistency across their products. The 1account team needed a voice and guidance on how to bring the Design team a level of maturity as well as its products.
Vision
Help clarify the brand’s personality, by setting consistency, brand guidelines to bring together all the services under one clear vision, mission and create a value proposition.
Create a Design presence at 1account to lead the company towards building internal resources have ownership of the assets and reduce time on deliverables.
Set the design process, evaluate and improve products where needed applying lean UX.
Be part of the decisions that would allow the team to accelerate the development of concepts and projects and gain customer engagement and retention.
Contribute to 1account’s culture’s development and stablish relationships with various teams, educate stakeholders about the UX discipline and its importance.
Branding
Expertise
1account’s design team has been outsourced for the 1st 3 years and managed by various internal resources. Due to the lack of knowledge of the discipline, the brand’s identity, vision and mission were sacrificed, resulting in inconsistencies, lack of presence and clarity on the message and product solutions.
Resources
Other resources were not available such as libraries and style guidelines, visuals were mainly designed and instructed by a passionate CEO.
Time and cost
Since the Design team was out sourced in Ukrane the time difference was a blocker resulting on asking for extra time which was costly.
All the above started from day 1 as my introduction at 1account.
The challenge
The Solution
Products review and inventory
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As part of the discovery, I needed to get familiar with all the products’s goals and vision. Understand how the product’s work, evaluate all the products states. Identify priorities and of course create a visual ecosystem and inventory of products, design component’s and repositories if any. Refer to any research conducted, look at the competitors to become familiar and understand where we were in comparison.
MIRO IMAGE HERE of the design universe
Branding workshop
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A part from meeting the stakeholders and understanding the spaces, challenges and needs, my objective was to understand the team mental models to ensure any dynamic activities proposed were clear with objectives, supported and fast as there was lots of resistance on doing team meetings.
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Run the a brand exercise, to align all the team with the vision, mission, ethics and purpose.
MIRO IMAGE HERE of branding exercise
Tools and assets
Propose tools and from the produc inventory start creating a library, create design guidelines, structures, processes on how assets will be managed, approved and delivere
Output
Understand 1accounts vision and mission, in order to start setting the foundations for the brand's personality.
Create consistency across all the channels the user interacts with, build 1 source of truth to enable the design, marketing, developers and sales come under one brand. of course this is a living task and everyday we keep looking at ways for improving it and ensuring this support the business in a long term.
MIRO IMAGE HERE of branding guideline