Design is currently in high demand, and it is crucial to recognize the impact it has on your customers whenever they interact with your business. These interactions can occur virtually anywhere, from your website's homepage to social media ads, commercials, print media, and more. However, the increased demand for design brings up an important question: How can a company consistently produce top-notch designs efficiently and effectively to thrive? DesignOps aims to solve this problem. Design Operations, or DesignOps for short, has gained significant attention within organizations nowadays. This is a significant development as it indicates a growing recognition and appreciation for the value of user experience (UX) and design. Discussions on how to effectively scale design have become mainstream.

This article aims to explore the fundamentals of design operations (DesignOps), its significance, and how you can use it to enhance your organization's design capabilities and scale them accordingly.

What Is DesignOps?

So, what exactly is DesignOps, and how can it be leveraged to drive business growth? In recent years, major brands such as Airbnb, Lyft, LinkedIn, and Twitter have embraced DesignOps to scale their design systems. In-house DesignOps teams have played a crucial role in delivering outstanding designs at the scale demanded by the market. DesignOps is a relatively new structure or role that emerged from the need to produce exceptional design on a large scale.

While you hire designers for designing and writers for writing, the modern workplace often poses challenges that impede these activities. Endless meetings, budget reviews, project planning, and inconsistent communication across the organization consume valuable time. Design should be integrated into every part of the organization, and DesignOps facilitates this by codifying the design process, establishing feedback loops, coordinating teams, managing design tools, and fostering a design culture within the company. Essentially, DesignOps focuses on everything around design, working to create a cohesive design language and process that brings consistency to all aspects of your company's operations.

To put it simply, DesignOps is the discipline that encompasses the holistic management of design projects. While project management in design has a long history, with agencies and consultancies having figured it out years ago, many organizations struggled to operationalize their growing design teams. This issue became more prominent as the demand for designers and design services surged, and large companies acquired design agencies. DesignOps emerged to address this gap. Similar to the role of a producer in an agency, DesignOps allows designers to focus on design while the operations team handles everything else.

DesignOps can be seen as either a dedicated department or an individual responsible for planning, defining, and managing the entire design process within a company. The goal is to streamline design by eliminating obstacles and inefficiencies, while providing designers with the necessary data, processes, and tools for success. DesignOps also plays a crucial role in the growth and development of design teams by operationalizing workflows and managing projects, budgets, and hiring processes.

Why Is DesignOps Becoming More Important?

It is becoming evident that DesignOps holds significant importance at present. The growth of the design function over time has been remarkable. We have witnessed companies recognizing design as a key differentiator.

Understanding the challenges faced by design teams is crucial, particularly in light of the increasing demand for design across organizations. Designers find themselves busier than ever, grappling with a high volume of work. Moreover, they often encounter obstacles such as attending numerous meetings, managing emails, and navigating collaborations with other teams. Consequently, they face unnecessary inefficiencies that hinder their work, making their job more challenging than necessary.

Many organizations have invested in building their design function, and in the past couple of years, we have witnessed a substantial increase in the scale of design hiring. Even startups with small teams of 25 now have five designers. This shift demonstrates a notable change from the past, where a thousand-member team would have only one designer. The ratio has now improved to one designer for every five developers. This transformation highlights the growing significance of DesignOps.

Who Does DesignOps?

DesignOps refers to all our efforts to streamline our teams, tools, and processes. Even though it has long been the focus of numerous researchers, designers, and managers, specific positions within DesignOps are now starting to emerge that are expressly focused on removing operational obstacles for design teams. These positions include design or user experience producers who oversee daily design tasks and procedures, design or user experience program managers who optimize a company's overall UX and design strategy, and research operations specialists who work to improve the caliber and consistency of research conducted by various teams. DesignOps encompasses all of these positions.

DesignOps is a broad field that includes many components that help to enable reliable, high-quality design. The organizational context and pain points should be used to determine the specific areas in which an organization chooses to concentrate its DesignOps practice. There is therefore no one "correct" way to develop a DesignOps practice. DesignOps can, and should, differ significantly between organizations.

Conducting internal research is essential before starting DesignOps implementation to determine the areas with the greatest potential return on investment (ROI) for your team and to identify the most significant pain points. You can build a strong foundation for your DesignOps practice by having a robust research plan.

How To Get Started With DesignOps?

To implement DesignOps, the first step is to ensure everyone embraces the DesignOps mindset. Once you have demonstrated how a DesignOps function can help your company achieve its goals, it is crucial to proceed slowly and carefully. Start by identifying the need to improve the efficiency of your design team. For example, you might require a new project management system or establish a standard briefing process. If the latter is the case, please refer to our other video on creating a proper design brief.

After identifying your immediate needs, hire someone who can embrace chaos and take charge. Find an individual who is willing to jump in and tackle everything, transforming the noise into beautiful music. This person should take detailed notes, provide regular status updates, and meet with designers to understand and address any obstacles they encounter.

It's important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to implementing DesignOps. The process should be tailored to meet the specific needs and goals of your organization. Success in implementing DesignOps is a gradual journey, so be patient.

DesignOps Tools

There are several tools available that can support DesignOps initiatives. Here are some commonly used tools but definitely not an exhaustive list of your options:

Design Collaboration and Prototyping Tools:

• Figma: A popular web-based design tool that allows real-time collaboration, prototyping, and design version control.
• Sketch: A macOS design tool with features for collaborative design and prototyping.
• InVision: A platform for prototyping, collaboration, and user testing.
• Adobe XD: A design and prototyping tool with features for collaboration and sharing.
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Design Version Control and Asset Management Tools:

• Abstract: A version control tool specifically designed for design files and collaborative workflows.
• Plant: A version control tool that integrates with various design tools, including Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD.
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Design Handoff and Documentation Tools:

• Zeplin: A tool that streamlines the design-to-development handoff process by generating style guides, specs, and assets.
• Avocode: A platform that helps designers and developers collaborate on design handoff, inspecting designs, and generating code snippets.

Project Management and Workflow Tools:

• Jira: A widely used project management tool that can be customized to support design workflows and collaboration.
• Asana: A versatile project management tool that can be tailored to meet the needs of design teams.
• Trello: A visual project management tool that can be adapted to manage design tasks and workflows.

Communication and Collaboration Tools:

• Slack: A popular team communication tool that supports real-time messaging, file sharing, and integrations.
• Microsoft Teams: A collaboration platform that offers chat, video conferencing, and document sharing features.
• Miro: A digital whiteboard and collaboration tool that facilitates remote collaboration and visual thinking.

These tools can help design teams streamline their processes, enhance collaboration, and improve overall efficiency in DesignOps initiatives. It's important to assess the specific needs and workflows of your design team when selecting the appropriate tools.

Conclusion

DesignOps has transformed how design teams work together and operate. It assists designers in consistently producing high-quality, user-centered products and experiences because it places a strong emphasis on streamlining workflows, increasing effectiveness, and encouraging cross-functional cooperation.

Organizations can use DesignOps to bridge the gap between design and development, ensuring a seamless workflow. This is done by implementing efficient tools, frameworks, and communication channels.

The advantages of DesignOps go beyond the design team, having a positive effect on the entire business by encouraging innovation, lowering friction, and ultimately improving customer experience. For businesses looking to maintain their competitive edge and produce outstanding design results, investing in DesignOps will be essential.

At Solwey Consulting, designing human-centered applications is our bread and butter. We provide design and development services that allow you to create the software you need. With our efficient and comprehensive process, if your company needs to develop an application, you'll be ready to launch your project in no time. Get started immediately by scheduling a call. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

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