Business: DesignOps

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss the newest discipline within User Experience: DesignOps, which covers the operational aspects of design. Most DesignOps practices have been standard operational practices within software companies for many years—they just weren’t called DesignOps until a couple of years ago, and they did not yet constitute an integrated set of practices.

DesignOps is such a new discipline that the term is still somewhat ill-defined—even though there’s already a conference that focuses on this discipline, the DesignOps Summit, for which 2018 will be its second year, and InVision has just released an ebook on this topic, The DesignOps Handbook. It’s unclear who originally coined the term DesignOps, but there is universal agreement that it was inspired by the term DevOps. This is just the second piece that UXmatters has published about DesignOps. The first was Jeff Sussna’s article “What DesignOps Can Learn from DevOps.”

In this column, our expert panel defines DesignOps, discusses what dimensions the discipline comprehends, and describes DesignOps roles and practices at several leading companies. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to integrate UX practices with a continuous-delivery approach. First, our expert panel considers the company’s goal: continuous delivery or delivering meaningful outcomes? They then discuss how advances in DesignOps can help in this situation. Finally, our experts provide several tips on working within a continuous-delivery pipeline.

Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com. Read More

Imagine you’re responsible for providing services to a stakeholder—whether you’re working for an agency or within an inside group. To win the stakeholder’s business, your value proposition must make your services more attractive than those your competition provides. This is a pretty typical situation for those of us who are responsible for business development—whether external or in house.

In Part 2 of this series, I presented a tutorial for creating a spreadsheet that helps you transparently scope, estimate, and reconcile services in a way that puts your customers in control of the scope of effort. In doing so, I defined the five basic steps that are necessary to build this tool:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables.
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More