How to hand off to next UX designer

Hi guys, not sure if this has been discussed before, I couldn’t find any threads. Also not sure which category it lives under.
I am wrapping up a contract where I have been the UX designer for the past 6 months or so. They are in the process of looking for a replacement - I am going on holidays then taking on different UX challenges for 2019. I’ve never had a hand off before (and never had anything handed off to me) so I’m not sure what to prepare for the next person and in what format.
There wasnt much documentation done in the process although I did write down a lot of my testing plans and what I aimed to gain from them - it’s a bit all over the place.
Any help or guidence or resources would be appreciated.

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I’ve handed off before but I can’t say it was hugely organised. 3 months out I started documenting my daily processes, making notes of things that came to mind, and made sure that each project was at a point that there were no loose ends that weren’t documented somehow.

The earlier you start doing this, the better.

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Yeah I wish I had thought of that earlier but it was chaotic enough when I first took this on. Once things settled I started keeping all my docs but not sure how to bring it all together.
Right now I am putting a doc together with links to slides, spreadsheets and files. Not sure how to make this more helpful.

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I’ve never done this as a UX designer but I’ve done it before as a developer and Project Manager.

I believe, the best tool for documentation and collaboration is Confluence (some vote for Basecamp). However, if you haven’t used wiki format for your docs moving all stuff to this system would be time consumable. Also, I suppose, you don’t need version control as you are preparing all at once right now. So, a hierarchy of local (or in Google Drive) files and folders would be also ok.

As for the structure, I am using the following for my current 2 projects.

  • Overview
    – Project overview
    – Target audience
    – Stakeholders
  • Research
    – Assumptions
    – Test plans
    – Interviews: Raw notes, Structured notes
    – Personas, Journeys, Use cases
    – Conclusions
  • Design
    – Sketches
    – Prototypes
    – Tests
    – Final version
  • Implementation
    (did not get to this phase yet)
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Thanks for sharing your structure. I really like it

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I would second confluence even though I didn’t use it in my last handoff I would now after having more exposure to it. In the last handoff I did I recommended that the agency let me stay on an extra week once the person started so that I could help transition/onboard them since there weren’t other UX designers in house to help guide them.

The list from @AnLev is pretty spot on so I’ll only add a few things I can think of as to what I did differently and how I’ve onboarded some designers recently or handed off work.

  1. If you use slack have the company setup a channel for the new UX Designer ahead of their start date.
  2. Use Trello, Wrike (or whatever tool your company uses) to get the person setup with a clear set of “to-do” objectives for the next coming sprints or objectives and what you’re hoping to accomplish from this work (outcomes). The product roadmap should guide this easily. I’ve used Basecamp extensively and that’s a solid tool as well, I just use Trello more now.
  3. Add the person to your Zeplin, Invision et al now. It can be easy to forget to transfer ownership or add them to the various moving parts with so much else going on in your day to day.
  4. Try and ensure all our wireframes, sitemaps etc. are heavily annotated and all layers are well organized.
  5. Leave parting notes for the product owners or PM’s that you wish someone had left for you when you started.

If you can get that extra week to help guide and ease them into the role it will be pretty beneficial and you’ll probably make a new friend! Good luck :slight_smile:

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These are great additional notes. I am going to copy these steps into a document for my next project.
I especially didnt think about the annotating wireframes for the next designer.
Cheers!

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Make sure it is all stored somewhere, where the new designer will find it. I have provided extensive resources only to find out the the new person didn’t even know the resources existed or the person I handed over to claimed to understand it but then made a complete balls up of it. These where code examples though.

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I pretty much made a google doc that summed up the project and sectioned off the doc with links to all relevant research docs, dashboards, files etc. Best I could do under the circumstances. It has been shared with every team member so it can’t be hard to find either. And I arranged it in a way that it can be added to and updated.

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