Building A UX Team
Driving innovation and operational excellence
OVERVIEW
I was brought on in 2014 to establish and build a UX team from the ground up, creating foundational structures for recruitment, standard operating procedures, and stakeholder engagement to drive early momentum and visibility for UX within the organization.
In building the UX team, the approach was both strategic and comprehensive, focusing on creating a high-performing, future ready team that could deliver impactful, user-centered solutions across the organization. As the team evolved, we prioritized key initiatives including establishing standardized practices and frameworks to ensure consistency, quality, and speed to market. We implemented a design system and invested in advanced training, driving skill development for both designers and developers to foster a culture of continuous growth and expertise.
To stay aligned with industry’s best practices, we engaged external experts to review our processes and procedures, ensuring our methods were robust and effective. We leveraged technological innovations to enhance our internal tools, ultimately delivering elevated customer experiences. To deepen our user insights, we broadened our research scope by conducting workshops with external customers, enabling us to craft best-in-class solutions informed by real-world needs.
Through these initiatives, I shaped a UX team that is agile, innovative, and well-equipped to drive strategic, long-term impact across the organization.
Timeline of Growth of the UX Design Team
The timeline covers a 5-year span and shows how the growth of the design team intersected with the needs of the broader organization.
Standardization was key and building upon our UX standards
The designs from the UX team were surpassing the skills of the development team. The goal was to make it easier for developers to implement more complex design patterns. Our company had not focused on front-end development so developers were not held to any Ul standards from a design aesthetic.
We revised the CSX Showcase by refining UX components, color accessibility scale, and improved the icon library to a more granular level and added code examples for developers. We also expanded our Front-End development support from a center of excellence with standards and SME level support for developers to request guidance on implementation of the UX design.
2014 - Inception
UX Team Formed
In 2014, I was brought on board to establish and lead the formation of a new UX team from the ground up. My initial focus was on building a core group of stakeholders invested in the success of UX. With their input, I drove early traction for UX projects and partnered with one contract designer, creating a portfolio of use cases and success stories that underscored what the impact of UX could bring to the organization. This momentum enabled us to recruit and onboard the first wave of talented designers, setting a strong foundation for UX across the organization.
2015 to 2016 -Standardization
2017 - Speed to Market & Expanding our tools
Increase speed to market with the CSX Showcase
UX patterns were introduced into the CSX Showcase to provide guidance versus providing prescriptive code as we continue to expand the Front-End skillset. Leveraging custom components built in applications and increasing the utilization of the same component by identifying a component to simply build upon versus creating a new component or pattern.
This allowed developers to keep a consistent design look and feel across multiple applications and the application suite started to resemble a more harmonious standard.This truly showcased the design
Evaluate and expand our tools and techniques to infuse UX through the enterprise
Attended a UX 2-day workshop at Center Centre in Chattanooga, TN. Evaluated the process to learn where we fall within the maturity process and learned we were several steps further than our UX counterparts at other companies.
Identified goals of increasing usability sessions, turning our business partners/analysts into guides versus taking their insight on behalf of users. Internally reviewed our design and prototyping tools and further reviewed our user research tools.
2018 - Growth
Push for more innovation and cross-training
Eliminate single point of failure within skillset and empower the team to learn new technologies and work across front-end, back-end, Web properties and mobile.
Re-platform older technology with cloud platforms, open source and using headless approach to allow using various Ul Frameworks in the future. This allowed us to move towards a developer community approach for building applications web and mobile.
2019 - Expansion
Evangelizing UX in technology and business
We had a tremendous ROI by leadership inviting the team to the customer forum for the first time as they found the value of UX in past engagements with internal applications.
Expansion of user research into our largest project to gain a seat at the table across the board with showing leadership that with a user centric focus how products will product better results. Provided sessions at customer forums for over 100 customers to gain insight for the design process. This was the first time at this magnitude the team was able to get in front of that many customers at once. Customers signed up for future sessions and had a firsthand look at how their insight was brought into the design process.
Roadmap Planning
Each year, I led a comprehensive refresh of a 3-year roadmap for the UX and Mobile team, aligning it with evolving organizational goals and customer needs. This process involved in-depth planning with stakeholders, adjacent technology partners, and team inputs to define and shape the direction of future initiatives.
In my role, I also served as a strategic guide for the broader organization, advising on roadmap development and identifying areas where the Digital Experience Team could provide expertise or lead impactful projects.
Below are examples of roadmaps developed from this collaborative and forward-thinking planning process.