UXmatters has published 11 articles on the topic DesignOps.
Whether you’re doing business development for an agency or an in-house UX group, to win a stakeholder’s business, you must provide a value proposition that makes your services more attractive than those of your competitors. If you’re managing a project, a team, or a business that depends on the delivery of services, it’s essential that you negotiate the project scope and ensure your stakeholders understand what you’ll be delivering before beginning work. It’s also important to reconcile the project scope and track status along the way and to manage costs and stakeholder expectations—not to mention your contractual obligations.
In this article, I’ll describe the approach that I devised for scoping, estimating, and reconciling services at Phase II, an external agency, and have since applied as an internal service provider at Intel and The Home Depot. The scoping and estimating spreadsheet that I created has evolved over the years and now accounts for a far broader range of services than it did initially. My work, whether at Phase II or as an internal service provider has always focused on B2B (Business to Business) applications—meaning I am serving clients who have clients of their own. This is an important perspective to keep in mind. In a B2B context, your clients need to know the costs of services they’ll incur as quickly and transparently as possible, so they can, in turn, manage their change orders with their client. 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
As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.
Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More