A look into how I was hired to shift the design activities from an external agency to a fully internal workforce.
Identification of core challenges
Directly after I started working at the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH was my first task to analye the status quo, I identified core challenges and issues that need to be solved within the next month and years. I spend around 2 month making a 2-3 year plan on how to tackle these challenges and broke them down into different steps and phases.
Findings:
Low UX maturity across the teams and the company
UX didn't contributes to the goals of the company
No concistancy across the products due to different tool usage
Everything worked externally within the process which led to long waiting times for designs & UX
UX had a lot of blind spots across the front-ends
Challenging the status quo and establishing the basic strategy
Defining a UX Vision & Mission
I spend my first weeks at the DCS to find out the key issues in the UX team and company. After doing internal interviews and research, it was clear that the UX team was not working on the same goals, which reflected what was designed and building in the front-ends.
Why we started to defining a Vision & Mission statement ⭐️
The mission and vision is very important for an UX team. It supports not only the team by reaching company goals, but also foster the team spirit because we all working on the same goals and making decisions on the same foundation.
Planning of a first teamworkshop 📌
A vision and mission never should be defined by the lead itself, it always should be defined together with the team. For that, I setup a day workshop to go trough the vision & mission, but also on the design principles of our team. The first workshop was directly after my start at the DCS and my second workshop was after we fully internalized our UX team at the Q3 of 2023.
Blockers along the way 🚪
Defining a mission and vision was tricky in the first place. As we worked together with only external agencies. One agancy called "Lighthouse" worked on our CHARGE NOW products since years now, they had their own load and own way of working. Creating a DCS UX vision & mission means they need to break out of their way of thinking the way they did it the last years. But I saw many opportunity here to not only improve the quality but also set a first mark for the DCS as a whole.
Final defined UX Vision
We provide value to companies and consumers by creating a positive e-mobility experience with a focus on our users' needs.
Final defined UX Mission
We improve the user experience for people with e-mobility needs by surfacing insights, collaborating cross-functionally, experiencing iteratively, maintaining consistency, and delivery quality design across our products.
