Transforming the UX Practice at Well
Companies aren’t going to fully understand and invest in the value of UX Practices, until they’ve had the opportunity to see results.
The first initiative I launched as Design Director at Well, was to establish a growth strategy for the UX team. This would include organizing the chaos through role clarity, increasing our resourcing, and establishing a process centered around outcomes.
My role:
Direct manager
Organizational design
Growth & recruitment strategy
Resourcing & budgeting
Talent development
Details:
2021 – current for Well
How can we discuss the value of UX, if we aren’t even clear about the roles on the team?
When I arrived, we were a small team—only one Product Designer—routinely overloaded with UX, UI and comprehensive illustration (to support clinical content). I worked across the organization to reframe what “designer” meant. The first step in establishing UX culture is helping the organization understand what it is we do, why we do it, and the different roles that make up the entirety of the practice.
Product Designers would be tasked with and responsible for our native mobile and responsive web digital experiences—we now have 3 dedicated team members in this space
Content is as much a part of the experience as the visuals—I worked with the Chief Product Officer to make the case for shifting our content team into our budding UX Practice
Clinical content is the heart-and-soul of our app—I made the business case for us to invest in a full-time illustrator who could normalize the art direction and expand our internal library
One of my happiest accomplishments, I am providing the mentorship and space for one of our UX Writers evolve his role into UX Researcher
How are we going to deliver great work, if we’re skipping over several key steps of the process?
Every project I witnessed upon joining the company went from PRD (product requirements document) to implementation—and somewhere, somehow in between design was spit out. If you don’t give your creative professionals the time, space and expectations to do great work—they won’t. So, I immediately began introducing health design operations.
Established a formal Design System (including our Experience Principles), ensuring a future-state wherein consistency for the user and re-use and rapid prototyping for the team would be achievable
Introduced and facilitated ideation workshops to teach the organization to start with the problem and/or opportunity, not the feature
Introduced usability testing (and tooling) to normalize research, iteration, and optimization as a foundational part of our process
Moved the team to KANBAN so that we could effectively have a conversation about load-balancing, priorities and expectation-setting
Began working in 2-week increments (basically, sprints) to ensure no project went into a “black box” without periodic check-ins and reviews
Introduced user-centered KPIs to ensure all of our work would drive outcomes
How do we hire good people that will help proliferate the practices and culture of user-centricity?
The recruitment and hiring process was the most compelling part of our team’s growth. Any time you have the opportunity to add people to an organization, it allows you to truly influence and shape the future of the culture.
When I joined the company, we had 1 designer who was juggling everything. It was not good, she felt undervalued and on the cusp of burnout. After getting to know her strengths, it was clear she could be a lynchpin team member. I quickly worked to reframe her role, resulting in a promotion, increased trust, and more space to do meaningful work.
In UX, we all try to hire for empathy, as we should. However, the trait that I have bet my reputation for team-building on is curiosity. I brought in 2 additional Product Designers that are relentlessly curious and inquisitive.
The key to unlocking our Product Designers was to bring in an Illustrator capable of working between the Clinical content writers and the Product Designers—with his art being the connective tissue in the experience. Our illustrator not only does that, but he’s a constant source of good vibes in any team context.
You would never know our UX Writers aren’t designers. That’s a good thing. They are curious, solution-oriented, and truly embrace the notion that their work is as impactful and meaningful to the experience as the design. This wasn’t always the case here, as “what will it look like” seemed to be the only setting across the organization. Our UX Writers have their fingers on the pulse of user sentiment and speak directly to it in their work.