A Deep Dive on Design Best Practices
In my journey from an award-winning small-scale creative agency to a global consultancy corporate, I've honed my skills by closely observing diverse product pipeline operations, cross-functional collaboration dynamics, and productivity nuances.
How my Best Practices document came about
Upon joining my current company, I identified workflow challenges affecting project alignments and outcome quality. Navigating the delicate balance between the absence of established guidance and the pitfalls of micromanagement, I proactively invested my extracurricular time to formalize and document a comprehensive set of proven design best practices, serving as a helpful guide for our team.
What it includes
The Design Best Practices concisely detail the rationale for key design components and more, including:
UI system
File housekeeping – layer setup, swatch setting, frame organization
Document and individual asset naming convention
✍️ Note:
I believe in actively fostering a positive workplace dynamic and have explicitly given credit to colleagues who supported me in shaping this documentation throughout.
Frequently used design dimensions
Common Adobe application troubleshooting steps
Categorized/vetted terminologies
Accessibility checklist
Internal authoring tool training
Pattern library and learning resources – a collection of reusable solutions such as interaction designs, prototypes, line-style custom iconography, categorized illustration and animation styles from past projects, and other useful design resources
Outcome
I iteratively refined the document based on insightful feedback gathered from colleagues in multiple disciplines. The end result is a well-rounded, concise, visualized, and fun day-to-day job aid for the design team, also serving as a crucial touchpoint in a structured onboarding experience for new hires. The improvement in design quality across the team has become increasingly noticeable, enhancing cross-functional collaboration, project outcome, and speed-to-market day after day.
Tried and True Improvements to the (lack of) Existing Project Processes
Having mastered the science of working under strict budget constraints at the agency, I quickly became a top performer demonstrating notable productivity upon joining my current company.
A passion for patterns
Beyond consistently adhering to design best practices, my innate passion of analyzing and finding patterns in everything I do is another contributing factor to my outstanding performance and exceptional productivity. I leverage this analytical approach to summarize and reflect on each of the past learning opportunities, consistently seeking more efficient ways of working. This commitment has led to the development of a success formula proven to be highly efficient and impactful across various projects.
3 years, and 70 projects
Reflecting on my involvement in over 70 projects at my current role, I’ve validated Design Documentation being the key 🔑 to a guaranteed design success. This powerful tool breaks down functional silos, fostering alignment, promoting smooth collaboration, and eliminating guesswork, redundancy, inconsistency, and communication challenges.
What is Design Documentation?
In a nutshell, the Design Documentation is a versatile hybrid encompassing elements of the Design System, layout templates, writing guides, and additional design assets (such as established iconography with their defining terms) collected throughout the project's lifecycle. The complexity of the documentation depends on the project's needs and size, ranging from minimal to more extensive.
Outcome
Utilizing such documentation provides expanded transparency streamlining the collaboration across team, significantly increases project scalability, accelerating speed-to-market by 2-4 times. (Or more!)
The tangible results include:
Significantly improved consistency and clarity across multiple designers/LXDs
Simplified script-to-storyboard handoff
Elevated accuracy and quality in development
Further solidifying our office as an industry leader in digital learning
Use case
Near the end of the 2023, a project team I’m a part of faced a daunting challenge: to deliver a high-stakes project for a public accounting firm three times faster than our average projects.
In response, the business increased resources by 3-fold, anticipating a corresponding acceleration in project speed. The agile nature of the work, however, presented challenges for team members, leading to difficulties in achieving desired quality. This was primarily attributed to a lack of standards and internal alignments during parallel work.
Recognizing the pain points within the project team, I strategically extended my media-use Design System and Templates into a broader Design Documentation for cross-functional purposes:
Planning ahead, I took a systematic approach by creating high-level designs, which included an elaborated Launchpad, all Title Slide designs, a theme of thought-through color strategy and visual elements that set the tone for all learning modules across the project. This step not only helps save time in the long run, but also provides a bird's-eye view of the overall organization and visualization of the learning design for easy reference.
Leveraging the draft of the pilot module, I further refined the layouts and curated a set of beautifully versatile templates tailored for various screen types – including intro screens, section breaks, video screens, interactive activities, business simulations, and conclusion screens. This not only added clarity during the scripting phase for Learning Experience Architects, but also enhanced the overall user experience.
This holistic resource further integrated concise writing guides, addressing elements such as module title casing and formatting. It serves as a guide for both Designers and Learning Experience Architects, minimizing the likelihood of inconsistent text formatting.
It also documented a set of instructional text for effortless copy-and-pasting, effectively eliminating inconsistencies that could arise from different Learning Experience Architects drafting varied wordings.
The team was immediately on board with this idea, finding it instrumental in achieving stellar collaboration and quality, especially on a high-stake and fast-moving project like this one. As a testament to its effectiveness, the project team decided to continue using and building upon this documentation for future business success.