Mindjet: Design Operations in the Innovation Space
Overview
Empowering customers to engage their communities with a crowdsourced idea and innovation management platform.
The Challenge
Starting as a Web Designer and Developer, I worked with customers to design and code bespoke product experiences to increase user adoption and engagement with the Engage idea and innovation management platform. Client projects began with a discovery call—my chance to get a sense of what the client was seeking in their innovation program.
On occasion, the team came in knowing what they wanted and needed the platform theming to match other user touchpoints. I was able to take branding materials and assets supplied to generate a PSD design for a quick approval. The majority of the time, the client would need more guidance on identifying the target audience and strategy, typically reacting via a directive from management to implement an innovation program. Given my tight timeline, there was no time to waste without a clear design vision from the client.
Team
After receiving a project from the Sales team I operated independently, interfacing directly with clients in both product management and services fulfillment roles.
Audience
Clients were typically communications and innovation teams of Fortune 100 companies, while users were the employees or consumers of the company’s products.
Constraints
Commitments were completed and implemented on the Spigit Engage platform in 16-billable hours over one to two weeks, including client calls, providing design comps and iterations of changes, then coding HTML, CSS, and/or JavaScript.
Process
Over time, I honed my intuition and skills to anticipate client needs, discovering ways to get the best results proactively. First, I developed exploratory guidelines to answer common questions in the discovery call. If clients had a vision, it was typically one to two iterations to final delivery and implementation. When a client wasn’t sure of the direction, I used two strategies to accelerate the process:
Revamp the discovery process to streamline information gathering and reduce wasted time in design cycles.
Develop a best practice playbook to educate clients about the critical engagement elements of a successful innovation program. Clients received the playbook when they booked their design service package.
Solutions
I managed to identify and solve multiple problems using...
Design Methodologies: Added a discovery phase to quickly distill the client’s vision for their program into a theme for their custom instance on the Spigit Engage platform.
Design Operations: Streamlined the design approval process to avoid churn and needless iterations burning up billable hours.
Customer Education: Developed tools to help companies create a compelling brand for their innovation program, moving the theming work from custom visual enhancements to features in the product.
Playbook
The short-term effect was that better briefs during discovery drastically reduced revision rounds for client approval. The long-term impact was that I developed a new client service offering that included coaching customers through the process of articulating their vision and voice for their engagement program. The Branding Package was 24 hours of consulting added to the 16 hours of design implementation, working with clients such as Amway, Adventist Health, Cisco, and Kaiser to create innovation programs that resonate with their target contributors.
Discovery & Approval
The playbook helped reduce churn, but I wanted to obtain design approval earlier. I found a way to get buy-in on a direction from the entire client team of instead of fiddling with Photoshop comps for hours. I introduced mood boards and style tiles into the process. Based on the brief supplied, I drew together options for each program with three mood boards using color, imagery, and words to articulate possible design directions. Once I received feedback from the mood boards, I put together a style tile with color swatches, font choice, and styling for links, headers, and content. Once the style tile was approved, I implemented the design on the platform, and the final design was approved live on the platform. These changes resulted in happier clients, smoother engagements with few revisions, and program branding, which resonated better with end-users.
Evolution to Revolution
My next challenge was to take my enhancement ideas to the services and product teams for the Engage product. The platform had a minimal amount of design control in the admin panel, but most of the styling ended up hidden in style or script tags in the footer of the page. That code effectively overwrote the minimal styling of the product by being read by the browser after the product styling. The head of services was on board with my branding engagement package based on my playbook; the next step was improving the tools offered to clients to maintain the brand in Engage. Our clients had a slew of touch points for their users (intranet, web, social media, email, print, etc.). I was able to ensure brand continuity, making Engage seamlessly with their innovation program. As programs evolve and change over time, branding updates for major corporations meant clients were coming back to ask for changes to colors or updating logos. I designed an enhanced branding control panel for Engage and pitched it to the product team. They loved it and invited me on to the team through the completion of the feature.
Retrospective
I love to understand problems and solve root cause issues. In this instance, I exceeded my defined role, discovering what can happen when we evolve ideas and improve processes. My win was threefold: I moved the technical portion of implementation into the product, gave the services team a higher value offering and more profit, and contributed to clients success in their innovation programs.