Barclays Compliance Technology: Working towards UX Maturity

In the design world, there are 3 levels of UX maturity:

1. Operational: Designers design based on requirements

2. Tactical: Designers and Product collaborate and are deeply integrated

3. Strategic: Designer influence the product direction.

Transitioning UX maturity from operational to tactical at Barclays

The UX process at Barclays in early 2015 was rather "old school". Product and Bausiness Analyst already knew what needed to be delivered and UX and UI designers were suppose to create mock ups for review and make design look beautiful.

Most UX meetings would revolve around what the higher management felt was missing in the deisgns, rather than what the users expected. Even when users were asked , they were lead to answer positive or negative responses.

For most part, large part fo the team did not know the difference between UX design and UI design. This led to applications being re-designed every 2 years. Only to find the same problems and the design organization being restructured.

Educating the team about User Experience and UI Design.

It was important in educating the team on the roles of the UX designer and how to collaborate with one to make most of it. As a UX designer I had to make it simpler for the team to understand how I could help the product in more ways than create wireframes.

UX designer provide value in the following ways:

1. UX Designers offer includes their processes and the artifacts they create that help inform and validate design and development around user needs.

2. we follow a process that includes data gathering, data validation, collaborative design, and usability testing of our designs.

I have reasons to believe that re-iterating this over and over again to the team, I was able to push the team to keep a user centered approach towards validating the problems and prioritizing solutions.

Wireframes and Designs at Barclays