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Increase UX Team Morale and Collaboration
Overview
Improve and mentor the UX team of 7 at Pearson Virtual School to be more collaborative. Lead weekly team meetings and encourage mid to senior-level design pairing.
Skills
Take on a leadership role by mentoring and advocating for change within the team. For example, I scheduled weekly sync meetings with the team to encourage sharing any blockers or issues.
Problem Statement
Pearson Virtual School's line of business was growing dramatically. As a result, our eight-person UX Design team needed to revise some of our ways of working to meet the demand for UX design deliverables.
As team members were becoming increasingly isolated and overworked by supporting many product and development teams—we needed to collaborate more to keep up with the UX demand.
Roles & Responsibilities
The ways of working was a self-initiated project after recognizing the need for more team collaboration and best practices within our eight-person UX team at Pearson Virtual Schools division.
Users & Audience
Individual UX team members and the Director of UX were the intended audiences for this project.
Scope & Constraints
I set a self-imposed deadline of 90 days to implement the changes on the UX team at Pearson Virtual School.
Process & What I Did
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1
Identify the problem by meeting with every user experience designer to understand some of the challenges they faced.
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I created a visualization that lays out how we can pair up and work with other roles within the organization. The suggestion was to have a UX lead and a supporting UI Specialist to help with best practices and design system management for each project. -
2
Design presentation in Figma that summarized findings from user research interviews. Present it to the Pearson Virtual School UX team and UX Director for feedback.
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Currently, one UX designer is responsible for an entire project. We were a UX team but working in silos for each of our projects. One UX designer would shoulder the burden of every aspect of UX design—leading to burnout and low team morale. -
3
I led weekly peer-level sync with all 7 UX Designers at Pearson Virtual School. Give mid and senior-level designers a chance to ask for help and provide updates on their respective projects.
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I proposed we team up on projects; this would help us be more consistent across product lines, increase team morale, and mentor junior-level designers.
Outcomes & Lessons
The Pearson Virtual School UX team collaborates and shares work more frequently, increasing consistency across their designs and team morale and mentoring.
This initiative sparked our need for a design system and UX principles to help us maintain consistency and best practices across products.