Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-spread-design-culture-in-traditional-organizations-part-i-a-framework-for-making-it-a-344c0c097ad0?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Alexandra Valdivieso 
<h3>A framework to create design culture in your company</h3>
Luckily, and thanks to a great community effort, Design has achieved a small place in large companies and organizations as one of the key resources to overcome the crisis, innovate and find creative solutions to differentiate themselves from the competition and provide value to their customers.
However, once we’ve achieved to take this space, “being inside”, it’s our responsibility that Design takes a more relevant role. This is easier in digital companies and startups than on more traditional companies such Banks. So, how might we make others understand the real value of Design? How might we explain to a top executive and the perfect knot of his tie, that it’s not just about “putting it pretty”? From my point of view, there are three core tasks that a design department in one of these traditional companies should accomplish:
<ul>
<li>First, create a consistent and delightful user experience for every digital product, as a tactical objetive</li>
<li>Second, design new user-centered digital products and services</li>
<li>And finally, spread and implement a Design culture in a deep and transversal way in every area of the organization, as final mission and largely as the result of having successfully completed the previous two.</li>
</ul>
In organizations accustomed to more traditional methods of work and without a great predisposition to change, the mission isn’t easy. In this article I would like to explain you in detail a framework to, hopefully, make it a little easier.
I take as base and source of inspiration the institutional innovation path by Nobl (you can learn more about it <a href="https://medium.nobl.io/what-every-institutional-innovation-program-gets-wrong-8943fdee9fce">here</a>). I applied the shape and flow of the graph to my framework to make the Design culture and guidelines penetrate across every area in the company, from the more exploratory stages to the more technical layers.
The result is something like this:
<img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*RzAKA_9faoT7RhPExrwoNg@2x.jpeg">
<h4>First space: The Core</h4>
Here is where we redefine how problems are approached, identify business opportunities and behavioral patterns, and help deliver more complete and innovative solutions.
My recommendation is to take this space with a small core team, where every profile is multidisciplinary but, at the same time, each of them is specialized in a specific phase of the Design process. A good researcher in collaboration with a data scientist, a service designer and a couple of UX and UI designers should be enough.
In this space, this team mainly deals with:
<ul>
<li>Analyze external and internal trends and data.</li>
<li>Stay close to users, get to know them and their needs deeply.</li>
<li>Create what people need.</li>
<li>Stay close to stakeholders to understand their goals, and to be coordinated with the goals of the company.</li>
<li>Identify challenges and business opportunities.</li>
<li>Define the digital strategy for new and current services.</li>
<li>Develop tests and validate the new ideas and services by using lean startup methodologies.</li>
<li>Define the right design principles of interaction and digital design.</li>
</ul>
The result of a good collaboration between these profiles and a good execution of their tasks, are new and good designed living services connected to the user and the business, and a delightful user experience ready to test and iterate before being transferred to the next space.
<h4>Second space: Bridge</h4>
Here is where we refine the processes before implementing the “real” service and transform it into an app, site or feature. This space is focused on aspects such as architecture, navigation, usability and UX/UI of the digital products.
To face this, the team must be composed of gifted senior UX, UI and interaction designers, who work hand in hand with a member of core team for a short time, while doing the phase-to-phase handover. Next, the Bridge team takes control, and are responsible for generating inertia within the project, lowering it down to land and making it tangible.
The role of this team is key, because they work as a link between the most strategic phase of the process and the space focused on day by day tasks, iterating between teams and transferring knowledge and feedback in both directions.
In this way, the key task of this team are:
<ul>
<li>Create tangible deliverables (app/site).</li>
<li>Ensure excellence in execution and consistency in implementation.</li>
<li>Navigation/Architecture.</li>
<li>UX/UI of the app or site.</li>
<li>Visual Design and Guidelines.</li>
</ul>
In this space the most strategic or special projects should be developed so that, if the tasks perform successfully, you can lay the foundations of the different aspects of products design and transfer it to the last phase.
<h4>Third space: Daily work</h4>
It’s no secret and it’s not so exciting, but it’s necessary to achieve an incremental improvement and maintain the digital product based on the guidelines.
Usually, when a project leaves the Bridge phase, it goes through many hands and takes an important risk of corrupting the original conceptualization and design. So, in this stage, designers should be completely integrated into agile teams, where they can be in the day-to-day implementation, work next to product owners, stakeholders and developers. They ought to be an active part of the project by giving their vision in decision making about changes or problems that have a direct impact on what and how gets delivered.
If you want to test this framework and you are responsible for managing teams, you should know that the key here is to keep this team motivated and inspired, so all the process is successful and can be fed back.
Within this space, each designer is concerned with:
<ul>
<li>Provide agile team with all the design assets and support that they need.</li>
<li>Ensure the right application of guidelines and adapt the components to each specific feature.</li>
<li>Make little experiments to validate hypothesis features (with users and stakeholders).</li>
<li>Create decisions based on user feedback and stakeholder input.</li>
<li>Spread an user-centric design culture and create a design mindset inside the agile team.</li>
<li>Constant switch between the micro and macro picture.</li>
</ul>
If everything goes well, all effort will result in an increasingly agile and fast delivery of user-centered services, delightful experiences for your customers and, more importantly, an organization becoming more and more aware of the real value that Design can bring to their business.
<h3>Laying the foundations: moving from theory to practice.</h3>
The best way to test this framework is to run it and pivot based on lessons learned, until the process fits into your company and everything flows. My advice, to start, is to define a couple of projects that initiate the movement both on a strategic and a tactical plane.
In my case, I defined two projects as transversal as possible, with a high impact in the digital product and in a lot of areas of the company:
<h4>In the core space: Human Banking.</h4>
A project oriented to segment users based on their financial behavior. This project allow us to know people deeply and conceive, design and deliver services based on obtained insights.
<h4>Half way between core space and bridge space: Our own design system language.</h4>
Create our own DSL with a deep level of detail that allow us to connect with every involved areas (product, marketing, branding, etc.). It is the ideal tool if you want to make a deep and transversal change in the user experience of your company services in a coherent and efficient way.
If you want to know more, stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3 in my Medium profile, where I’ll try to explain deeply this projects and how they help us to spread the design culture inside my company.
/Hey! Before you go, please let me know what you think below. If you find this post useful, please share or 🖤 so it can reach others as well.
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<a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-spread-design-culture-in-traditional-organizations-part-i-a-framework-for-making-it-a-344c0c097ad0">How to spread design culture in traditional organizations (part I): A framework for making it a…</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to spread design culture in traditional organizations (part I): A framework for making it a…

A framework to create design culture in your company

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