Enterprise UX

One of the greatest challenges of designing at the Enterprise UX level is scale. The key to success is the implementation of a set of repeatable process and methodologies that enable a small central team to have the greatest impact on improving the user experience of products across multiple product lines.

A core mission of our UX Central Team was the development of artifacts such as Personas and Journey maps that could be used by teams across multiple Business Units. To do this, we held a series of workshops aimed at harvesting our institutional knowledge from company leaders with years of experience dealing with customers and users.

You cannot deliver a quality consistent enterprise-grade User Experience, across multiple product-lines, without a definitive set of standards and guidelines. We started with a set of basic UI Guidelines and developed those into a complete Design System, complete with visual guidelines, re-usable front end components, content style, and a library of design patterns set to be published at the end of 2017.

One of our UX Team's core goals was to generate awareness and motivate cultural adoption of UX practices. Key to this effort was a series of bi-weekly cross-business unit sessions, where diverse teams could share work-in-progress designs and share ideas and feedback. In addition, we ran skills workshops aimed at non-designers (managers, engineers, product managers, etc.) who did not have UX resources available to participate in the design process themselves, and published a successful UX Community portal on our company intranet.

A successful User Experience is an outcome, not just the title of a group. It is people collaborating as a team to solve tough design challenges - designers, engineers, content authors, QA, and product owners, all sharing together in it's success or failure. To that end, I was fortunate to work with some of the most talented and smart individuals anywhere at Akamai.