Governance, process and digital guidelines

Hi has anyone worked on embedding and creating UX governance, processs and digital gudelines into a large organisation who have different teams doing UX which need to be bought together and developing UX and design in one consistent way?

Any tips or success stories would be much appreciated?

Hi Parker,

My workplace is currently just starting out with a UX group, and we are currently working on guidelines to standardise components, patterns, tools etc used across all our products. So my suggestions is that you actually need to get everyone in one room for a workshop.
The things you need to nail down:

  • The design process that you generally follow (keeping in mind that it can change depending on the project).
  • The tools and outputs, and design decisions behind the output. If you don’t record the design decisions you can end up coming back to a design and not knowing why it was done in a certain way. So figuring out how this is captured.
  • What standards you will set around the types of outputs and how you interact with the other teams such as development.

It also depends on whether you are a company doing in-house products, or whether you are a consultancy doing work for other companies. If you are in-house then having these can help because you will then get consistency across the products and the look and feel:

  • A pattern library
  • Component library
  • Visual design: such as font, colours, icons

But the most important thing is that everyone has a unified view, that terminology and things are consistent between groups.
We are also working on getting code in our wiki too for the components and patterns :).

Folks involved in the development of the GE interactive toolkit have talked quite a bit about it lately at conferences I’ve attended:

http://www.frogdesign.com/work/ge-ux-centers-excellence.html

The themes there echo Natalie’s comments—developing useful, reusable components and agreeing on a process are key.

But I’d also say that basic team building is instrumental in getting people to change their process and way of working. Beyond a simple workshop, identifying who the influencers in each team are, and getting them together to bond over karaoke or bowling would be a good start, so that they can get excited about working with each other and working smarter!

Hard to know without more context, but hopefully that’s helpful.

I’ve done this many times. All completely unsuccessfully :slight_smile: I mean it. It’s really, really tough. UX folks are naturally of a personality that doesn’t like to be constrained. Plus, it’s really tough to come up with guidelines and approaches that cover all the interactions that you’ll want to design.

You will need to have everyone genuinely on board from the beginning. They will ignore you otherwise.

That sounds not useful, but it is. Knowing that it’s going to be incredibly hard is better than thinking that it will be easy, then wonder why you failed…