Hetal Jani

I am a senior Usability Architect at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). I have more than 16 years of experience executing a range of user experience projects on diverse business domains like- Finance, Banking, Insurance, Retail, FMCG, Marketing, Training, Logistics & Transportation etc. My key areas of expertise are user experience analysis, information architecture, usability testing and researching in the areas of experience design in the emerging technologies. In TCS- Product Experience Center of Excellence, with a mulita-skilled design team, comprising of Ux designers, visual designers, front-end developers, information visualization experts and content writers, my role and responsibilities include developing and managing effective and robust Design Ops in the group. I am passionate about Ux design and its ability, to directly impact peoples' lives. Personally I am also fond of music, reading, chess and lots of travelling.

Effective Design Ops for a successful Enterprise Product Development

18 min TED like Talk | Categeory: Business Design | Target Audience: Design lead, manager, design practitioner, senior designers; all those who understand the need for organizations to scale up design with the support of well- conceived operations. All those who want to learn about Design Operations (Design Ops) and go on to help define and make Design Ops a way of life in their organization.

Your organization might have great design talent; but without smart design operations in place, keeping pace with the ever increasing demands of development, poses quite a challenge. Effort duplication, unlimited iterations, and loss of originality then become the norm. Senior designers are weighed down by the rigmarole of everyday monotony involving operational matters, rather than directing their skills and expertise towards the larger organizational good. Production schedule slippages and deterioration in design quality becomes an everyday experience.
To support your designers and scale up your organization’s design capacity and capability, the focus now needs to shift towards effective and efficient design operations. This includes the entire gamut of responsibilities- right from setting up the design team, providing required training and mentorship, monitoring the product deliverables, and testing the Ux quality; to creating pattern libraries, generating reusable repositories, and forming appropriate guiding design principles that can be easily built, used, maintained and enhanced.

Three key takeaways

• Be natural and fluid: If collaboration requires noticeable effort, then there is room for improvement

• Exchange hats: Amplify, enable, and empower cross-functional product teams into UX aspects. Inversely, partner effectively with other necessary functions.

• Evolve with the design system: Once it becomes a need to support multiple teams, your design system starts to become a product of its own.