Why ‘the first rule of fight club’ doesn’t exist for designers at Sysdoc…
In the past, the curtains have always been firmly closed when trying to gaze through agency windows to understand how design teams work and collaborate on projects. A company’s creative processes remained a mystery and the unspoken rule that employees were not to share the ‘fight club’ secret rang true.
At Sysdoc we’ve pulled down the curtain rail, opened the windows and are actively sharing our approach with everyone we know and quite frankly, anybody who’s interested. We’ve been refining our ways of working for many years. Whilst we acknowledge our design process will continue to grow and develop organically, we’re confident that our tried and tested methodologies will continue to add great value to our clients.
As designers at Sysdoc, we’re passionate about amplifying the importance of User Experience (UX) and strive to put the audience at the heart of everything we do. The goal is to make this a focal point for the entire company. To demonstrate how and why, we walked our Business Transformation and Learning Innovation practices through our newly defined ways of working. This is outlined through six key pillars with each phase including meticulous testing and multiple user interaction points.
1. Engage
Initial client engagement and definition of the problem statement to initiate project kick-off.
2. Discover
Detailed technical design activity to define and validate the scope of the solution.
3. Design
Design and prototyping of the proposed solution for validation through testing.
4. Develop
Development, through planned sprints with regular feature and progress demonstrations.
5. Deliver
Deployment to the client’s technical environment and validation through testing.
6. Review
A look back at the project to see where we can improve the process, product or offering
Our Sysdoc Digital Experience process
By sharing our refined processes, mistakes (let’s face it, nobody’s perfect) and learnings* accumulated over time, collaborating with our other practices has helped them understand the value of adopting an outcome-led approach for their projects and programmes. Many businesses and people commonly make the mistake of thinking only designers can implement a Human-Centred Design (HCD) approach, however we find ourselves of the opposite opinion - we can all champion HCD, and this is what we practice and preach.
That’s right, the shackles are off. It’s time to start breaking rules, challenging norms and sharing.
*Confession time and this isn’t easy but despite our fancy MacBooks, niche coffee needs and unheard of UX terms that we occasionally throw around, our design team actually doesn’t have all the answers. Our role as designers is to ask the right questions, teasing out the answers from our users and translating their feedback into tangible solutions.
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