Design-Ops for beginners

What is this Design Operations stuff?

You may have noticed a growing demand for a relatively new title, Design Operations (or DesignOps or Design-Ops or DesOps – lord, the design industry does like making titles difficult) and wondering what the hell it is and why is it in so much demand?

Simplistically, Design Operations is the strategy and tactics that optimises the people, processes, and skills involved in the design process, to ensure that design in an organisation can make the highest impact.

1. It addresses the evolution and sustainability of designers and design
2. It ensures that the right type of designer, with the right skills are attracted to the right roles and that they never want to leave once they’ve been hired
3. It creates efficient workflows and design systems
4. It improves the quality and impact of design outputs

Why is it in such demand

That’s quite simple too. The demand for design in all its forms, UI, UX, CX, Service, Solution, Product, and all the other commercial design practices imaginable, has never been so huge, more key to success. Especially as the world of ‘Digital Transformation’ evolves away from the adoption of technology towards a true HCD mechanism (those who have always done it correctly would argue it always was). As organisations realise the high ROI on HCD the demand for design has increased dramatically.

Now establishing a team of designers is easy, throw money at it and you can have a team of designers inside of a week. Establishing truly great designers and empowering them, making them efficient… that's not quite so easy. That’s why Design-Ops is in such demand, it makes design work rather than just exist.

Design-Ops seeks to empower designers and design, it is in itself not about a finished design.

If it’s not design what’s in it for the designer?

If you’ve been in any way shape or form involved in leading a design team over the last 10 years or so one thing is clear, you’re spending less time now then you did then actually designing. You’re involved with creating and maintaining design patterns and libraries, style-guides and definitions, so your designers can just get on and design. You’re knocking back the solutions handed to you by non-designers, so that your designers can just get on and design. You’ve been banging on about UCD and research and outputs to those who hold the budget strings so that your designers can just get on and design.

You probably feel like you stopped being a solution designer a while ago, you’re now an enabler of design.

Not true. What you are doing is still design, what a Design-Op does is design the design process itself. If you’re a leader in the design field Design-Ops is one of the most rewarding things you can undertake because you are key to making good design happen, key to removing all the noise and interference and poor practices that have haunted you for years and making sure those in your charge are never bothered by them. It’s probably the most important design role you’ll ever have.

Understanding how your Design Ops works, or more often doesn’t

Take a look at the Exec team at most places and see how many have Design-Ops at that level. They might have them in the structure, usually sat under a Product Director or Dev-Ops, but how many are at actually at the tip of the strategic decision making process? Design in most places is still widely regarded as ‘just’ a creative concern, the colouring in of UI or adverts, making things pretty, an enhancement to features nothing more, it certain has no place in business decisions.

Those places are destined to fail in today's market, even the one's requesting transformation programs.

There is a very basic principal that is missed with a lot of companies seeking digital transformation. It’s not digital that that needs to transform it’s your entire operating model. Right now your organisation is brilliantly, perfectly, crafted to produce the solutions you do now. If you want better solutions your organisation needs to change to make them happen and no matter how many systems you put in place how many screens you have littering the desks, without that organisational change you’ll still be producing the same solution you are now. One of the key changes you can make is to enable Design-Ops in strategic planning and implementation and give it an equal voice to others.

Drivers not Enablers

If your strategy is about automation, new operating models, data analytics, exciting new technologies, even HCD, then you are set-up to fail because all those things enable change, they themselves are not drivers of change. Leadership, culture and understanding emerging market needs, so you can adapt to changing customer behaviour, are your drivers, they are the ‘why’ to the enablers ‘how’. You can’t just guess at the why, you need to understand it and translate it into viable, well designed solutions. You need to know the problem then design the solution.

You wouldn’t let a designer make decisions on the intricacies of your backend technology or structure your finance department, what makes you think your Technology or your Finance Director can make decisions on the intricacies of design?

Design not Digital

Digital is such a useless word isn’t it? It’s generic, it can mean different things to different people from everything with a screen to anything which needs a CPU. It’s the equivalent of going to a restaurant and ordering ‘food’ when what you really want is the best meal you’ve ever had in your life tailored to your own specific tastes.

While the word design can have many of the same problems it is at least understood to be a logical process – see below - ?a conscious process eliminating the unnecessary and superfluous to produce a solution that is desirable and wanted. Design is the driver not the tools it uses, not the computers or the software – design largely doesn’t mean digital it means thinking, it means drawing out ideas on paper, testing them, and binning the ones that don’t work, the end solution might not even be digital, especially if improving a service design, but the design process itself is key not the technology or other tools it uses.

Users not BAU

This is the one that trips up so many places, the end user might well be another business (B2B), but it will be a human that makes the final decision to buy or not, not the business entity itself. Your source of revenue is people not technology, not software, an actual human being. It might be easier for you to use existing technology but does that translate to easier for the human who you want to buy your solution to get what they want? If your tech isn’t flexible enough to meet user needs, you need to change your tech. If your business isn’t meeting user needs, it’s your business that needs to change. You might want to sell a particular item, maybe you’ve over ordered on stock or want to get a bigger margin on selling ISAs, but what is in it for the end user? They didn’t want the stock last week why would they want it this week?

Expecting humans to adapt to your business is old thinking, empowering managers who want nothing more than to add features and maintain the status quo is not just old thinking it’s damaging thinking. Your business needs to change to meet end user needs, because the end user certainly isn’t going to change to meet your business needs. Design-ops is the way you do that.

Understanding what designers want

I got into a heated online discussion a couple of weeks ago (like we have a lot of face-to-face ones, nowadays) after posting a link to a Design-OPs role for a friend. It started off wanting to know more about the role but soon became about design leadership and what it took to be a good leader. Some were concerned about small changes not disrupting business practices (ha, like I'm going to work like that any more), some were about the process, some were about organisational culture, some were about personal development, some were about the balance of multiple disciplines, a lot of enablers but few drivers. All of them are important of course but what it really boiled down to, we finally agreed, was simple empowerment of the design team.

So, how do you do that? How do you get to the heart of what it is to be a designer? Designers are an odd bunch, they’re driven by creativity, about getting the best results in front of end users, they’re about the satisfaction you get only from satisfying others. Of course they see a commercial value in that and move on quickly if they don’t achieve it, but it’s mainly the work itself that is the reward. Get that right, make them feel valued and enable them to get results and finances tend to be a secondary concern. Once you understand that then it’s the make-up of the designer that is your focus and how to leverage it. So you should know that there are, in general, there are three things, three ‘sets’, that make up a designer.

1. Mindset

Your designer’s Mindset is how they approach both the problem and the solution. Mindsets should always be flexible, always be adaptable, and always be passionate about the exercise. Don’t just encourage, challenge your designer to expand their mindset. If they’ve only one way of looking at a problem, they’ll only have one way of finding a solution, you and they need more and the best designers are always seeking more.

2. Skillset

Your designer’s Skillset is what experience, what natural talents, what learned knowledge they bring to the process. A skillset should be growing constantly as well. Encourage your designer to gather new skills without any fear of failing, even mistakes are learning experiences, you’ll both benefit.

3. Toolset

Your designer’s Toolset is what they use to bring their mindset and skillset into play, it isn’t just the software they use it’s how they communicate ideas, it’s what they use to illustrate and validate the process of deconstructing a problem and constructing a solution for others. A toolset will differ for different challenges so you need to ensure that they have an array of tools to call upon. Make sure your designer can always develop their toolset.

Empowering a designer

Empower your designers in all of these ‘sets’ and reap the benefits if you concentrate on just one, because of some immediate or need or because of a narrow understanding of business needs and you’ll miss a big opportunity. Fail to empower all three and you’ll not only run the risk of losing the designer, through frustration, you’ll never innovate, never truly meet new challenges, you’ll just be copying the last working process without thought to alternatives and that’s nothing more than an exercise in mediocrity and a big fail for your organisation, your UCD team, and ultimately your end user and profit-margin.

Understanding how design operates

This is a big topic. See this is why people write books on this stuff rather than articles. Let’s start off with a dictionary definition of what Design is, this is from Merriam Webster:

“Definition of design -

transitive verb:

to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan”

You’ll notice that at no point do the words User Interface, Product, System, Service, UX, CX, Building, Automotive, Teddy Bear, Lego, Floral or Decoupage, or any other deliverable, get mentioned. Design is a something you do, a verb, it is not a thing, a noun.

Far too often organisational heads get caught up with what is being designed rather than making the process of design work and then get very angry when the process churns out something that nobody wants. “Here’s the solution just Photoshop it” is the phrase everybody knows and laughs at, until they have to live it with it.

Design-Ops exists to stop that from happening - it stops non-designer from pretending they're designers - and ensure that the process of design is the best it can be for those who are actually designing. they make Design Systems.

Design Systems

This is where it gets noisy, because like every other system a Design System is adaptable to what it is being used for and has both Tools (software, style guides, component libraries etc.) and Concepts (brand values, accessibility guidelines, definitions etc.) My design system will differ from yours, in that the brands I have will have different values to your brand, my software will be different to yours depending on deliverables. Again design is a process not a thing and the process is adaptable. Your Design System is made up of shared goals and resources so that regardless of the type of designer they’re all working efficiently together, even when working apart.

Using a Design System

So it isn’t about what is in your Design System so much as it is about what are your designers going to do with it, and what for? If your designers are purely concerned with UI then you’re probably not going to be overloading the system with Brand Values so much as logo usage and typography. If it’s content design then your Brand Values, Tone Of Voice, Presentation and Image Use will form a much more fundamental part of the system. If you’re a UX designer then your system might be heavily loaded with research processes, personas, interaction models etc.

Your design system is as much a UCD concern as is the process it is facilitating, the users in this case though are the designers themselves. Your system must match their needs.

Types of Design System

There are really two types of Design System, strict or relaxed. You’ll find the balance you need somewhere between the two.

Strict is, as the name suggests, inflexible. The must haves, the must complies, albeit the software you use, the layouts and components etc. that must be adhered to. Strict isn’t fun but it’s great very for quick turnaround of small changes that will upset no one.

Relaxed gives you more room to design, it’s useful for setting boundaries but gives freedom to explore possibilities so is useful for new concepts and challenges that need new solutions.

So what makes a good Design-Op?

Good question. Short answer: Polymaths of the highest order. Long answer: The best I've come across are those who have come up through the design ranks and have the scars and bruises to prove it. They don't just know how to design, they know what makes best practices and what business needs to do to empower great design - usually because some of their scars are from places that didn't do it right. They have this incredible desire to help other designers avoid those scars while delivering the best results for the business and the end user.

If that was all there was to it then every Senior or Lead Designer in the world could easily be a Design-Op. To really make it work though they must have knowledge outside of design as well. They need to be able to talk psychology to researchers, trends to data analysts, code to devs, process to BAs, budgets with finance, tech with SAs, and ROI with senior stakeholders, all the time with a focus on the end user.

They have the mindset, skillset and toolset (oh come on, you know I was going back there!) to enable the best strategic design planning for business and can develop the tactics to make it work.

Conclusion

Let’s revisit that first question again, what is this Design Operations stuff? If you’ve made it this far then I hope you’ve realised that it isn’t just another title or buzzword (thankfully) not just something to put an extra zero or two on to a Design Lead or Creative Director’s salary (sorry folks), it’s the key to unlocking strategic design capability in an organisation.

It’s the process that ensures that User Needs and Business Needs are met and that the final result empowers and enriches not just the end user and the business but the people who produce the solution too. It isn’t making things pretty, it is equal in importance to any other business unit that has a voice in business strategy and outcomes.

Design-Ops is a sign that the demands the design community leaders have been making for decades, that design has a place at the board table, are finally being met.?

I for one welcome its rise.