Building a Digital Product Design System

View fullsize

PROJECT

Digital Product Development

CLIENT

American Society of Civil Engineers

ROLES

System designer, Web designer, traffic analyst

PROBLEM

The association had rolled out a comprehensive redesign, but the Web team still followed a services approach for updating content and features. Demand overloaded the team's limited resources and the piecemeal assignments made strategic product development impossible. 

SOLUTION

I borrowed elements of Agile and iterative development to construct a user-focused design system. It expressed work units as user stories and included both story grooming and a feature backlog. I converted existing work orders into user stories and trained staff to create their own.

I created diagrams and other materials to help staff explain the system to the rest of the organization. I designed and ran a workshop for the team to improve their facilitation skills and thus improve the quality of requests submitted for consideration.

To jumpstart product development, I identified key performance indicators and programmed Google Analytics to report them. I also analyzed traffic since the redesign and delivered an easily digested report that included recommendations and data visualizations.