TerraQuest.

Some background.

The project was in its infancy when I joined. The business’ digital transformation had only recently begun, the product team was still forming, and project requirements still being gathered. This project was one of the first of the company’s digital transformation programme to get underway, and was to be conducted in hybrid DevOps-Agile sprints.

Aligning to the company’s transition towards becoming a software as a service (SaaS) provider in their field, the scope of this project was to both design from scratch an industry leading best-in-class ‘land referencing’ geographic information tool, and also to help establish a design system for this and future products. The project was DevOps oriented, involved mentoring an in-house designer, meant being a design authority for the business, advocating the importance of considered design within the team and wider business, as well as conveying the need to design-for-the-user, and not the system.

Project challenges.

There was a low UX maturity within the business, but a huge willingness to learn. There was also a need to fit a UX-lead UCD approach to projects and working practices within their existing DevOps methodology.

Oldworld Creative also took on the role of managing and mentoring their in-house junior visual designer to aide and improve their quality of output, workload management, and wider learning.

There also emerged a need to assist in the establishment a design system and help in retooling from XD to Sketch.

Lessons learned.

I learned about ‘technical spikes’ in DevOps - an intense developer-led refinement process where a piece of work would be investigated so the scale, scope, and required approach could be understood and sized ready for a future sprint.