Here are some patterns I have seen in my current role that have been effective in building our UX team.
1. Make sure visual designers, UX/interaction designers and UX researchers collaborate together
Collaboration usually happens with a UX team when 2 people work together on a specific product, part of a product or project. The best collaboration happens when the 2 working together have different areas of focus. For example, one of your visual designers would work with one of your UX/interaction designers to help make user flows visual appealing, brand compliant and visually consistent with the rest of the brand. There should be little differences of opinion between them because each person should be seeing the product through a different perceptive. The visual designer is focused on the look and feel and the UX/interaction designer is focussed on the user flows, user interactions and how the user is consuming content.
2. Establish design principles, a style guide and UI kit
If your UX team knows what each element on the page should look like, what UI elements are used for what interactions and how the brand essence should feel to the end users, your team can focus more of their time on high value activities. High value activities might include conduction usability sessions, creating scenario maps, conducting design thinking activities and other activities that help create solutions for UX issues on the product.
Also, working with developers and vendors will take less time. Vendors and developers will really appreciate you for supplying them with documents that will help them give you the product you desire.
Host your design principles, style guide and UI kit in a shared space and make them easy to share with others.
How much of your team’s time is spent on figuring out how a drop down menu should look? Or on other similar, low value tasks?
3. Create a UX process and UX research process and share it with everyone you can at your company
Creating and sharing documents like these can help build your reputation within an organization. Other teams will feel more comfortable working with you and your team. They will get a taste of what to expect before you work with them for the first time.
You don’t have to use every part of your process on every project. However, giving everyone a process that contains all the tools in your tool box will make your team look experienced and well versed in the field of UX.
Thanks for reading. Be blessed, be thankful and enjoy today!