Duration: 18 months
Overview
I led the Design Academy community of practice at Redgate, created to provide cross-functional development teams at Redgate with the design and research skills necessary for modern product development. The mission of the Design Academy was to:
To provide a community for learning, practicing and sharing design, and research best practice across Redgate in order to improve how design and research is carried out.
Design Academy activities
Working closely with product teams at Redgate I put together a plan for Design Academy activities to help upskill non-designers. This included:
- Regular online training courses covering topics such as usability, UI basics, accessibility and user research.
- A 1-day foundational design course for new teams and new starters.
- A monthly newsletter to share design and research resources.
- Regular internal campaigns to raise the importance of design and user research within Redgate.
Upskilling non-designers
As product teams at Redgate have a single product designer it’s essential that the rest of the team have the know-how and mindset to be able to play the co-designer, and co-researcher role. To help upskill non-designers I planned and co-ordinated a curriculum of online courses covering key design and research skills. I prepared and ran a number of these courses, including an ‘Observing customer interviews’ session and usability best practices session.
To help incentivise participation I set-up virtual badges for Design Academy attendees. This also helped to track attendance.
Capturing learner feedback
In addition to speaking to engineers and product managers about what they wanted to learn about design and research, I also utilised a simple feedback survey to capture Design Academy course feedback and to crowdsource ideas for future courses.
Raising the profile of design
In order to raise the profile of design within Redgate I co-ordinated a monthly newsletter to share news from the Design Academy, along with useful design and research resources, such as articles, videos, podcasts and books.
I also co-ordinated campaigns, including a ‘Usability been framed’ competition to celebrate World Usability day.
Upskilling designers
The Design Academy didn’t just help to upskill non-designers, but designers working within product teams as well. As the Design Academy lead I planned and co-ordinated activities to do just this, including:
- Face-to-face and online meetups with other design teams to share and discuss best practice.
- A book club to explore and discuss useful design and research related books.
- Regular workshops to practice design and research skills, such as sketching and research analysis.
- Video lunches to view and discuss design and research related talks and videos.
Results
The Design Academy has quickly become a thriving and well-respected community of practice at Redgate. Over 150 Redgate employees have attended at least one training course, with courses being rated 4.5 out of 5 on average. Non-designers and designers alike have reported that they’ve found the range of Design Academy activities very useful and have been able to start applying what they’ve learnt to their day-to-day work. All this has contributed to increasing the UX maturity within an engineering-led organisation and increased the level of design and research work being carried out across product teams.
Learnings
- There’s always a lot to learn from other design teams – Knowledgeshares with other design teams always highlighted fresh perspectives, tools, and practices to consider.
- Democratising design helps create design champions – Empowering non-designers through training and mentoring not only raised design and research skills, but also created lots of design advocates within the organisation.
- The importance of showcasing the ROI of a community of practice – Demonstrating the business value of the community through metrics and success stories was important for building senior buy-in and support.