Documented, enterprise design standards supporting homogenous customer experiences across different systems and touch points are often considered a holy grail of UX design. In many ways they are. bBut they can also lead to unintended consequences for both the design team and subsequent designs. We draw on experiences from a large federal agency to describe the impact, some positive and some less so, that mature but evolving design standards can have on designers, design and the development processes.

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Interaction
Research in Practice.16
Studies UX Pros should know
Kath Straub
Usability.org
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Enterprise UX patterns:
Good, bad and ugly
Kath Straub, PhD

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Abstract
Documented, enterprise design standards supporting homogenous
customer experiences across different systems and touch points are
often considered a holy grail of UX design. In many ways they are.
But they can also lead to unintended consequences for both the
design team and subsequent designs. We draw on experiences from
a large federal agency to describe the impact, some positive and
some less so, that mature but evolving design standards can have on
designers, design and the development processes.
Attendees will be exposed–for the first time–to the agency’s
extensive and extensively tested design patterns, and will benefit
from a frank discussion of the new challenges that evolving
enterprise standards introduce.

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Design patterns
The Easter bunny
& the O’s in first place
Promises, promises …

4. Benefit
Consistency across systems and devices.
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5. Benefit
Patterns reduce everyone’s effort.
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6. Benefit
Supports the paramedic model of UX
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7. Benefit
Integrate testing across projects.
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8. The User Experience Framework
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Agency Web Patterns

9. If you could change 1 thing
about the way you’ve developed
or managed your web standards,
what would you change?
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10. Key insight
Developers are users, too.
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We are here.
Challenge
Patterns are necessarily deployed incomplete.

12. Challenge
Role of developers morphs
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Challenge
Pattern developers have to make choices.

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Challenge
Pattern developers do not want to be CSRs.

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Challenge
Pattern developers have to make choices.

16. Challenge
Patterns are documented as atoms not molecules.
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Challenge
Pattern documentation testing needs to be multi-layer.
• Find
• Apply
• Modify

18. Challenge
Overtime patterns and code become one.
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Patterns
Code
Axure Prototyping Tools

19. Challenge
Designers with “advanced” tools stop sketching (!)
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20. Benefit? Challenge? A little of both?
The role of designer changes, too.
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21. Challenge
Designers start think in patterns first, not needs
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22. Challenge
Designers now come in two flavors
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Compliance

23. Challenge
Retrofitting legacy systems to patterns
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We are here.
What’s next?
Web
Components

25. Methods
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Questions?
What do you think?

26. kath@usability.org
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathstraub/
@kathstraub
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About the speaker
Kath Straub, PhD
Principal
Contact

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Usability.org helps organizations around
the world improve customer engagement
and evolve their customer research/
design capabilities. We provide
• Customer research
• Interaction and communication design
• Evaluation
• Training/mentoring
• Organizational change strategy
• Staff augmentation
Have a question? Please ask!
info@usability.org