In our organizational framework at iborn.net, design cultures play a crucial role in shaping excellence, growth, and innovation. A culture is a knowledge-sharing community or "guild" where professionals from across departments align their career paths, share expertise, and tackle discipline-specific challenges.
Each culture is responsible for:
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Identifying and solving domain-specific problems
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Setting shared standards (via a design playbook)
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Enabling individual and collective professional growth
Currently, we have five thriving cultures: UI/UX Design, Development, Quality Assurance, DevOps, and BI/ML. This article explores our UI/UX Design Culture through its purpose, structure, process, and achievements.
Why We Established a UI/UX Design Culture?
As a company, we have several long-term projects from various industries which all require specific expertise in UI/UX. B2B, Enterprise or B2C, web app or mobile, insurance, travel, music, IoT, horticulture or anything else - each of us has a clear goal for bringing great value on the table, both for the project and for the team, in a form of product design, clear specification, ideas for growth, fast turnaround time, feedback gathering and high quality delivered to the end user.
We all work with a different team and face different challenges every day, so regular catch-ups are essential; they allow us to collaborate in specific ways that help us overcome the challenges and boost our knowledge and growth. Every designer shows to others what they are doing, and shares their expertise to create a great collaborative atmosphere.
Activities like brainstorming, collaborative wireframing and generalizing solutions help us get to a solution with higher quality and much faster - all key to UI/UX culture. Besides solving problems together, we also form a training program each year and we organize knowledge sharing sessions to improve our technical knowledge so that each individual can become a better UI/UX expert.
Product Design Within the UI/UX Culture
Speed as a Key Success Factor
The whole idea behind successfully designing web or mobile applications is speed. Yes, clear specification is also very important, providing consistency across the application, and yes, a lot more arguments can be made here, like quality, user centric thinking, building the right product - but if one thing has to be put on the top of the pyramid, it must be speed. The pace at which we are able to throw ideas on the table, organize them, select the good ones and develop them into prototypes, test those prototypes and analyze the feedback, and iteratively improve them, is a crucial factor of success.
Teams can work without designers - and probably develop a solution that works, but that solution will be of the quality like the first prototype a designer will build. In other words, if the same team can get the tested prototype after 5 iterations and then start the development, they will save 4 iterations in development time and they will get much higher satisfaction levels when they launch. And we all know the importance of the first impression.
Now, having defined speed, or pace, as a key factor of success for designing products, the obvious question is put on the table: What can we do to get there faster? Well, of course technical knowledge and collaboration are pretty important here. Also the process and standards which save iterations and time spent on forgotten aspects. And then the obvious thing that drastically improves design speed are a proper design system and team libraries.
Our Design Process: An 8-Phase Approach
Based on all of our combined knowledge and experience we have meticulously crafted our own design process, closely aligned with design thinking and adapted to the level of quality we want to deliver. Оur process consists of these 8 phases:
- Setup
- Research
- Define
- Ideate
- Wireframes
- Mockups
- Testing and feedback
- Delivery
First, the process starts from the project setup, a very important step often overlooked, until it creates problems. This helps us function as a team, following the same structure for every project where we can all find our way around and maintain a controlled chaos.
Second, we work on research (or the empathize phase), where we understand why we are building the product, we get to know the human users with the aim of understanding their wants, needs, and objectives as deeply as possible. Needs must be identified and understood before they can be addressed with effective solutions.
Third, we move to the define phase, dedicated to defining the problems identified in the research phase. Here we gather our findings and make sense of them by asking ourselves questions about the users' needs and problems.
Only then can we move to the ideate phase, the next phase of the design thinking process, where we generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as sketching, prototyping, brainstorming.
From here, we move to the wireframing and mockups phases, finally resulting in prototypes we can objectively test in the testing and feedback phase.
Last is the delivery phase where we make sure that the end design checks all the checkboxes, has no loose ends and is ready for development. This process sounds linear, but often we adapt, iterate some phases and move between some until we have delivered.
Design Standards: Quality You Can Measure
Each of the eight phases in the process has a list of standards that we adhere to, a checklist that guarantees we have covered all important aspects and gives everyone a clear overview of where we stand.
Together, this compiles to a list of 46 topics (at the moment), covering various principles and important design aspects, ranging from responsiveness, accessibility, user control, navigation, closeness and alignment, personalization, context, familiarity and a lot lot more of these (it’s a pretty extensive list).
Sometimes it’s ok to skip some of these things, break things, move things around, go out of process - but we always know what we are missing and how to address it. Each topic has a clear description explaining why it’s important, how to achieve it, examples and use cases that help each one of us understand and implement that aspect, achieving better compatibility with our standards.
Design Systems and Libraries
We have developed several design systems, and of course each application has its own or a version of some genetic, but we also rely on a wireframing design system that everyone on the team can use to make a screen in under a minute and put their ideas together with everyone else's. Then, from wireframe to mockups we mostly use material as a starting point and our design system on which we base the application design system. Tokens also help us adapt it in the form needed, so we can quickly change the components without having to rework them.
The library we have built over the years consists of lots and lots of components solving things like navigation, forms, tables, filters, user pages, reports, details panes and other similar components, and these are often timesavers by just being adapted to the project we are working on, as they save tons of time and we skip a lot of potential problems on the way.
How we Learn and Grow
Every quarter the UI/UX culture sets OKRs and reviews them in order to improve as a culture. This technique gives us several advantages, with 2 key ones: focus and objective, measurable results.
We all contribute to our standards as well, by adding new ones, linking resources, adding use cases and improving the existing ones. We always like to participate in conferences and workshops, and we also do our internal workshows at least once a month where we train ourselves to become better. Our library of books and courses is always expanding, and with the guidance of a fellow designer we always get the best possible recommendation.
Our Achievements so Far
Combining the use of collaboration, building technical knowledge, design systems and libraries, having our own process and set of standards, we are able as a team to build and iterate on prototypes really fast.
This has resulted in 17 fully developed products with countless features and releases over the past years. What is even more important to us is that a lot of the ideas helping the end users originated in our culture. We have helped millions of people get proper health care, use their health insurance and get better, organize and book their travel plans, distribute their music worldwide, gather feedback from marketing campaigns, organize smart devices in their home and a lot more, which helps us understand the world better and design the right products.
