How a UX Guild Can Boost UX Maturity in Your Organization

by David Wenk | Nov 17, 2021 | UX and Business

When my former CTO asked me to create a UX Guild, I was skeptical. Yet another obligation to sink my time. Today my UX Guild is one of my favorite intrapreneurial passion projects. I want to share my experience with you how this project turned out into a successful UX maturity booster in my organization. 

What is a Guild?

The guild framework is part of the well-known Spotify Agile model. Cross-functional team members are passionate about a topic, yet not working in that field can form a Guild like a community of interest. For a UX Guild, the Spotify guild framework is hard to adapt if you don’t have a big design team and a low UX mature organization. You need to adjust the guild’s strategic focus based on the organization’s UX maturity level.

A UX Guild can work as a strong pillar of a company-wide UX strategy to improve UX maturity in a B2B organization.

Here are projects I did myself, and you can do with your UX Guild.

Teach UX to Everyone 

The best way to multiply UX knowledge is to teach it to your colleagues. You are planting tiny investment seeds into the future of UX maturity. (Besides, it’s also simply nice to share your knowledge with everyone interested.) Everybody who joins my guild will get training in UX fundamentals and Design Thinking. Once a UX enthusiast learns some skills, you can involve them in real design projects and workshops.

Facilitate Design Workshops with your UX Guild

You can enable your UX Guild in any design workshop format, e.g., the Design Sprint. Design Workshops are a great way to demonstrate the value of design practically to non-designers. Exactly what we want to increase overall awareness about Design Thinking, isn’t it? 

I treat the UX Guild like an in-house design workshop agency. Advertise for your service and look out for opportunities within your organization where the guild could help. Almost like a creative in-house SWAT team who comes in to ignite an inspiration fire.

Multiply your knowledge times ten

A Product Owner once told me, “the problem is that so many people don’t know what UX can do for us.” This stroke a cord on me. Why not use the guild as an internal loudspeaker for debunking UX myths?

My UX Guild is making a UX fundamentals training course on your internal learning platform. Everybody newly hired in the Technology department will automatically get an email to take our UX course in their inbox.

It can also be a be weekly newsletter or video with UX best practices. Any multiplier of UX awareness is gold. 

Conclusion

There are a ton of other projects you can do with your guild. As a design leader, my point is that you can use a UX guild as a strategic instrument to get closer where you want, especially in B2B organizations. 

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How Designers and Developers Should (Not) Collaborate

by David Wenk | Nov 13, 2021 | UX and Business

One of the best moments in my job is when I can join Sprint Reviews – the Development Team is presenting their production-ready work. It’s when you see your designs come to life being part of a customer-facing product.

Many times, however, I’m sitting in these meetings, and I’m cringing, “This looks different than I designed it” or “We should have discussed this earlier.” 

I thought about it like this – Sprint Reviews are a health indicator of the designer-developer collaboration. If you see too many pieces of the outcome look different from your UI designs, it can be a sign to improve the partnership.

Here are three of the common designer-developer collaboration pitfalls I experienced and how I overcame them.  

You see Developers as execution robots. 

I believe developers are designers too. They build something that people will see and experience. We need to enable developers with design skills and empower them to make the right calls to make good designs. Even better, involve developers in your design process.

Working in silos and lack of communication.

Giving the development team access to Figma to inspect the UIs is not a designer-developer collaboration. You need to talk to each other.

When designers and developers never talk to each other, you are set up to fail. I had my best design to production outcomes when I met once a week with our front-end developer to implement my designs. Of course, in larger organizations, this can be challenging. A weekly designer-developer review can result in wonders.

Developers don’t know why they are building something. 

If you don’t know what customer or user problem you are solving with your work, you are likely not building a great solution. I like to Involve developers along the design process, e.g., in design workshops, shadowing in usability tests, or user interviews. It adds so much more background information to User Stories than the usual story refinements. 

Conlucsion

Sprint Reviews are the cherry on the top of designer-developer collaboration, not the only one. Empower your developers to make calls on the design. Have regular Design review meetups with your dev team to align on a common understanding. Involve developers in your design process, so they understand the ‘why’ behind the product design.

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