TN Child Support
A project to revamp a 30 year old child support system was in turmoil
I was brought in to manage the design team, right the ship and deliver a release.
Project Landscape
Everything is on fire all the time 🔥
30 year old system, code is not friendly, dev is underwater, design system was a lift-and-shift leading to unnecessary patterns and a jury-rigged* component system.
*Much research went into this phrase and, yes, it is jury-rigged…or jerry-rigged….or jerry-built.
Specific design problems that needed solving
Manage and fix the revolving door of designers, align with development, show leadership the value of design, fix the design system and bad design patterns. Just the easy stuff.
Can I steal you for a second?
Interview exiting design team members. Main issue was processes changing every few months, not sticking with anything, team needed some semblance of stability. Immediately began design working sessions, and became readily available to the development team.
Change is incremental
Move fast and break things had worked well to get the team up and running fast, but it was time to pause and take a step back to fix the broken things. I began fixing some of the strange design patterns that had cropped up, as well as oddities in development. Sticky Nav codepen
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Building Rome in a day
Short timelines, lots of breaks and a lot of deliverables. Managed to refresh the design system, test for AA contrast and update components. Built & re-built components to be more modular and usable across the system.
Finally met my match with a text label SNAFU.
Get your house in order sir
Teams can only run around with their hair on fire for so long before they need to stop-drop-and-roll. Started small, but built on team structure by formalizing design documentation and setting procedures. Up to that point our PM was making best assumptions on design timelines, so I got my Gantt on frequently so leadership was more realistically informed to our teams needs. Team dynamic was amazing and needed to be fostered to help offset the workload stress, so we reintroduced a monthly culture hour to relax and have fun with our teammates.
Outside our team, I established procedures for handoff by mapping touch points and interviewing team leads for pain points.
Outcomes
The design team was able to hand off all the designs for the release within three months. Because of the methodical efforts of the team, there wasn't a single revision needed due to technical feasibility. This hadn't happened before. The downside? It took us longer than typical…who would have thought quality work might take longer?!?
All the while, the tech team and leadership were realizing they had created a hot mess of code. Once leadership figured out that the development team wasn't able to easily (cheaply) update the code base, the project was re-evaluated. The outcome was that the client would rather have a modern looking application that would have releases every 4 months, then scrap everything we had and start fresh with a Salesforce solution. This meant any future design would be a 1-to-1 solution and the design was shipped to India. I slowly watched my large team get cut to one designer.
I still have nightmares about our usability testing prototypes…