How building a design process helped in digital project management!
How we built our process in order to improve our work, organization, and collaboration with clients.
A year ago, after joining Vitamina. the main goal was to improve the quality of our services, so we could provide our clients with a more consistent work and also to improve our communication with them.
From developing marketing campaigns to creating websites and designing a new brand image for the company, these were among the firsts steps I took in building a Design Process.
SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS?
Things were not always perfect.
Projects went well, but there was always something missing.
There were some details that needed to be polished and there were key pieces of information that were lost constantly, from the briefing up until the project development.
After a conversation with the rest of the team, taking some courses and doing the research that I needed, we decided that the best way to improve the way we were working was to create a design process, in order to avoid loss of information and a lack of communication.
This process was inspired by the Design Sprint book by Jake Knap from Google Ventures and the Design Thinking process created and taught by Tom & David Kelley by IDEO, and last but not least some valuable information was taken from the Process Masterclass course by Nguyen Le.
With all the collected information, it was time to divide our process into these 6 following steps (before moving forward, check my other blog post: Design for your clients, not for your ego):
- Understand;
- Define;
- Ideate;
- Prototype;
- Test;
- Launch.
Why did we update our process?
Since the digital world is constantly changing and improving, it is important to keep up with new solutions in order to achieve our client’s goals and to be flexible enough to find a way that could be applied to most projects.
This means that you don’t need to look at it as a golden rule and follow it like a manual, since every client has different needs, but it’s a way and you can adapt it and change it, according to your needs.
Next steps
As we are constantly striving to improve the way we work, the next step we want to take is to create a Design System in order to improve our design consistency and visual style guides, so if you want to know more, stay tuned for the next Design article.
