OrthoFi: Director of Design

PROBLEM SPACE
         When I arrived at a start up called OrthoFi, they were missing design direction to move from a product that was conceived from a paper napkin the CEO drew and brought to life by developers into something that can serve their customers in next generation platform. Orthofi wants to move from legacy code space into mirco-service stand alone product offerings. Not only that but they also want all of their products, from internal to external enterprise tool to look and behave like they are from the same family. They also want to improve "user experience" from features that were tack on top of each other ah-hawk from the dev. OrthoFi was a engineer driven organization that has not been operating with standard modern product.
          Did three things that set OrthoFi's up for success from a design stand point. I begin to map our a process that involves research and exploration prior to developing features. I attracted and hired a designers that covers the spectrum of experience from  Sr. Researcher to experience UI Designer. With those key hires in place, I can bring on a Jr. Designer to fit our budget and be trained by myself and the other designers. We are now responsible for multiple projects and initiatives with insane schedule and demands from the PM's to do things faster, but we wanted to stay in sync with each other. It was not possible unless we have a Design System in place. While the company do not understand the important of a design system, we did and we begin to crave out time to work on it outside of our time on projects that were allocated on the roadmap. 

Design Process

           This design process was a culmination of my experience in academia as well as in consultancies. Going board to understand the problem space and vetting if we are solving for the right user needs is the first step. It also includes practical steps to include the engineering team collaboration. 
Some of the main issue I face, was getting 3 different scrum team to follow the same steps. We were working with teams that have never had any formal product process. We were also working with PM that are first time PM or PM that came from organization that never had design involved in a product development. It was hard, but there was a break though when I heard a PM said to me " Let's figure this out in a design studio" It was a win for me because they are finally understanding design process but also see how value able it is when applied to product development.

Design System

         "La Cedilla" was born the day, myself and 2 other designers, decided to use the company hack-athon day to get together to establish the fundamentals for us to move forward as a design team. Thus, a system was established for OrthoFi next-gen product suit was created. We had to establish the basics so we can move with speed but could keep our product suite  look and feel like they belong with each other. It would be a living and breathing document that designers come back to as we worked on our own product. 
​What's in the system?
Foundation
Brand
Components

What's left? 
As our team dives deeper and deeper in their own product, I felt the design system needs a philosophy to serve as a North Star for our designers. Furthermore, we need to spend time to figure out navigation. We have a complex service and Saas product eco-system. A formal information architecture research project has to be launched to figure out our next navigation. 

Hiring a Team

          My approach to hiring a team is to assess the immediate needs of the organization and on a 2 X 2 and prioritize the skill levels of the designers I hired to best fit the budget and the business needs. 
The skills needed for a well rounded design team:
- Research
- IA
- Interaction
- Visual Design 
- Strategies

1st hire is a full stack designer that can jump on a project right after initial kick off. 
2nd  hire is a full stack designer with heavy research & strategy experience. 
3rd is also a full stack designer but with experience in UI design. 
4th is a Jr. designer first design job. 
This round out our team of high performers that can cover for each other's weakness with our unique strength. 

The Results

          A suite of products that launch OrthoFi into Next Gen. The following work was under my direction, but was built the 4 designers I hired: Jackie S, Daniel A, Anna B, Britt C. 

Methodologies I brought into OrthoFi as I build the Design Department

Generative Research & Synthesis

          Establish a process that includes interviewing the user first hand and glean information from that interview to inform product design. I also showed teams how to conduct generative research with users and how to synthesis interview notes so that they can prioritize that information into final design.

Design Studio

         Design studio is a really important exercise to get everyone's thoughts out on the table. This is a convergence and divergence exercise for the team to approach a problem space in the early stage when things are still ambiguous.
If ran well, you would have stakeholders, engineers, PM, and designers at the table. You would have everyone's perspective and you can have a really good debate. The outcome is that everyone felt they are heard and have weight-in on the project. The designers now can take all of those ideas, combine them with the knowledge from the user research to have a strong jump off point from research into designing.  

Advocating Design Process

      When I join OrthoFi, I established a product design process that includes both PM and designer working together to do early stage stakeholder research as well as generative research. This is something that was not typically done prior, but it's very important for designer to be a part or research and relationship building so they have context to the product they are building.