As UOB corporate banking’s digital platform, the Infinity programme is run by 200+ staff across ASEAN and the Greater China region.
I joined as the Design Lead to restructure and build a new design team of committed individuals to produce good quality work fast. I updated our design workflow for handoff, revamped our design system guidelines and caught up with the product backlog. In 5 months, we scaled from a team of 2 to 13, built a positive team culture to ensure personal and professional growth, and the programme resumed BAU operations with a refreshed view of how to collaborate with the design team.
Client
UOB Corporate Banking
Project scope
Growing and managing design team culture, design evangelism, DesignOps
Change management is no easy feat, especially when you’re new and speaking with a seasoned businessmen who aren’t intimately familiar with design workflows and methods. Together with my team’s new project manager, I approached our venture in 3 steps:
Our short-term goal was to catch up with the backlog and get everything back up and running smoothly, but in the long-term, I wanted the programme team to recognise the value of design and move away from simply asking designers to make UI mockups. Instead, we should be empowered with customer insights and collaborate with Product Owners on the product vision as it evolves.
I represented the design team at weekly steering committee (SteerCo) meetings, reviewing our team’s progress in catching up with the backlog and pushing for prioritisation of workstreams. I also highlighted the struggles the team was facing: mismatched design patterns where similar product flows had inconsistent approaches, a desire for more informed design decisions, and the overall strain of trying to catch up and reach a more sustainable backlog.
It was paramount that the product team understood our situation and supported us as we made the shift to help the programme get back on track. By providing updates of our team's goals, our intended actions and solutions, and what help we needed, we gave everyone visibility on our progress and gained trust and buy-in for ourselves.
As a young team starting off at a similar stage, we had the opportunity to define a new team culture together. Wholesale banking is not an easy topic, and most of my team members have never designed for it. To build a shared understanding of our corporate customers and how the existing product functions, I set up weekly knowledge sharing sessions and design crits to come together as a team.
Designers would pair up and do a 10 min sharing on UX tips and how they could be/were implemented in our product.
These tips were then shared out in a weekly newsletter to the wider product team in an effort to help educate non-designers on why we insist on design improvements and how minor details could impact customer experience (eg. using improved colour codes for better reading contrast). While we did not track the open rate of our newsletter, we received feedback from some POs and tech leads that the design bites were good tips, and it helped to enlighten a few other product people along the way on the impact of good design.
To build our own understanding of our users, we collated a list of our own questions about our users and identified how to begin answering them. Some involved trying to recruit CFOs and our target users for simple user interviews; when we struggled to recruit them, we spoke with their proxies—corporate banking relationship managers and the customer support team for insights on common desires and pain points. We also started to make landscape studies part of our purview, so we could observe design insights for ourselves while growing our understanding of corporate banking systems and interfaces.
To ensure that everyone shared a consistent understanding of good design principles, I hosted weekly design crits where team members could bring issues they encountered, or to highlight design patterns in their workstreams that they felt could be improved.
Oftentimes, these discussions helped designers to realise that similar flows in their workstreams adopted different design patterns—as a team, we used these sessions to agree on a standard pattern/guideline to follow for new designs; meanwhile, any identified deviations from our established standards are then tracked and highlighted to POs as product enhancements, with an overall goal of creating a pattern library that we could reference.
This not only allowed the younger members to practice presenting their work and get feedback in a safe space, but it also helped them think critically about each other's designs and as an output, laid the foundations for us to rebuild the design system.
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