When I joined Verisk as a Senior UX Designer in early 2020 I noticed the suite of products were providing different experiences to customers, but not just that, the way the UX department communicate internally towards Product teams was different depending on the project. These teams were working as independent silos and I felt one of my biggest goals was about working in this kind of transversal initiatives.
The main objective is to unify the experience across all Verisk Specialty Business Solutions products both to customers and to projects stakeholders. Building a Design System will create an unified visual language, unified interactions, UX patterns and tone of voice. That will make every Verisk product to be identifiable and part of the same products suite. But how to get unification internally, towards Product teams? In the Design department we were using Figma as our main tool and I realised Figma has a powerful API were design tokens can be connected to the coding side, which would get a number of benefits, like simplifying the hand over, creating a standardised basic components based on those tokens, and eventually creating a single source of truth.
Teams work in their own way, their backlogs are full of implementation and delivery stuff. I’ve tried talking to several Product Owners and even they’re interested in the initiative they couldn’t engage because they didn’t find real benefit on getting involved into this. So instead of trying to progress this initiative consistently in all and every product I found a better way to push this forward.
Firstly I created a Microsoft Teams channel to engage with all Front End dev from every Verisk Product, telling them I wanted to create sort of a community to share knowledge around UX and Front End stuff. Most of them really appreciated the idea as they felt there was a lack of communication between teams and were looking for a way to learn from, understand and meet with other products colleagues.
We celebrated a first meeting were I developed some Design Thinking skills and facilitated a workshop where the Rose, Thorn, Bud method (Luma Institute) uncovered the agreement and joy in creating a shared Design System fed by Figma API, but also some concerns around how to proceed and to keep consistency with what we had so far. Then we grouped the ideas into groups/categories by using the Affinity Clustering method (Luma Institute) in order to find patterns and create some action points.
