OKRs at Checkfront for achieving outcomes

Category
Design Ops, UX Strategy
The product design team took the course OKRs 101 and eventually began planning our own Key results.
Part of the reason I was promoted from Product Design to a Senior Product Designer was that it was identified I was able to take a rough concept of an idea, and create a strategy and plan on my own to achieve the said goal.

What are OKRs?

OKRs are one of the frameworks used by many tech companies like Google and it allows teams to identify Objectives that are then broken down to Key Results. It's like KPIs with a soul.

My achievements

  • I created a backlog of UX debt related to improving onboarding and churn - Early in 2022, we collaborated with OCADU. OCADU is a Canadian Design University and they had a program where their design experts conducted a Heuristic analysis with the focus on how first time users perceived and used Checkfront. To take immediate action, I created an epic of tasks that multiple teams can pull from.
  • I completed an Accessibility Course from Deque University and was the voice for Accessibility in the company. Through this work, WCAG AA was achieved for Checkfront's website. Through my efforts, there was buy in for accessibility and it is now considered for new projects. Feel free to view my canva presentation intro to accessibility.
  • I completed a copy and micro copy audit of the website, support documentation, and top most visited pages within the Checkfront app and brought my findings and recommendations to all product teams. This helped establish the copy feedback channel in slack and copy guidelines at Checkfront, now used by all product teams post merger with Rezdy and Regiondo.
  • Mobile audit - Before I left, I was in charge of the mobile audit to fully understand what are the current weaknesses for the guest and operator experience that need to be prioritized.

Building high performing teams through psychological safety

Category
Design Ops, Culture, Learning
I was very passionate about increasing Psychological Safety in teams because I attended the UXDX EMEA conference in 2022 online and there was a session on Forming and Coaching Elite Design Teams. I wanted to help my team, but then I realized that Psychological safety is both a problem and challenge that I can help with.
  • I learned that it is not enough to learn about how psychologically safe teams feel.
  • It is important to educate first, track, and take action.
  • By establishing a safe space can people perform better.
  • By tracking what was not working, and what was within our team's control, I could see progress.
  • For the team I was part of, steadily, we kept hitting our goals and was one of the top performing teams at Checkfront.

Mental health and wellness at Checkfront

Category
Culture
This was a personal project. I wanted a space for the company to be able to ask questions about company benefits, advice, and have a place where people can publicly ask for help.
We established a slack channel for this and HR was involved to help engage the rest of the company.

Helping designers and developers grow in tech through mentorship

Category
Learning, Culture
I have had the pleasure of mentoring a few people in the past few years.
  • My first official mentee was from ioAirFlow, and it was an awesome learning experience for me. I was a direct manager, but also a friend.
  • I also participated in official mentorship programs in Checkfront.
  • Lately, as I kept creating more content online, people have come to me for help.
  • I've also met people in person from events who approached me for guidance and it helped me make friends and connections.

What do I get out of mentoring others?

I'm happy that I'm able to positively contribute to someone else's career, growth, and well being. I do know that it's a time consuming commitment, but I find that I learn as I teach or give suggestions.

I never stop learning, and I share my knowledge with the people around me

Category
UX Strategy, Learning
In most companies I've joined, I tried my best to do a few things which helped me gain more buy in for design.
  1. Encourage active participation for design workshops - it's not an easy muscle to do a task that other people may think is a waste of time, but I do my best to become a facilitator for collaborative design workshops. I've done a few design sprints, affinity mapping exercises, prioritization meetings to help unblock our projects especially when we're dealing with new concepts.
  2. Socializing research - I find that some research in certain companies never see the light of day, so I try to share the summaries of what I'm doing in product demos and keep people in the loop, especially stakeholders. Research repositories are so helpful for this.
  3. Sharing design articles - If I find anything interesting, I will share it to the company for them to have a read.
  4. Making design presentations and sharing stories - It's funny because UX has been around for awhile but so many people don't know what UX or product designers do, why we're not just pixel pushers, and why we need to do research.
  5. Changing and shaping the (design) processes - UX is a culture shift, and processes must change and be established / continually adapt in order for UX to be effective, so I often find myself influencing how we work in a product / development team. Sometimes I get push back from people who are not used to working with design, but I also try to find other champions. It's been a fun journey so far.
  6. Encourage collaboration - I know that doing design is not just a designer's job, it's a job that everyone does together. So I don't often start designing alone only to share the ideas after.

Design System Work

Category
UX Strategy, Learning
For a few of my design consulting projects, I started using design systems to help create modular designs or themed features, apps, or website pages. Since I have knowledge in accessibility, I try to ensure the components created are accessible, even if it's just a small part of getting accessibility.
At Checkfront, I conducted the research on the current state of our design system, Beacon
  • Beacon was built by an external agency.
  • We had problems in maintaining it as there was no clear owner within our team.
  • Beacon's documentation was nonexistent.
  • Beacon's Figma components were also incomplete, making it a challenge for designers to create high fidelity mockups and prototypes fast.
  • People wanted an easier way to collaborate, and one suggestions was to use a ready made library like the Google Material UI Design System.
Through my research, we got the green light to start using google's MUI for new projects.

Projects with Design System + Pattern Library Work

To date, I have used this approach with
  • Uberflip Pattern Library - I initiated the first pattern library and file restructure.
  • ioAirFlow and PremiseHQ - I helped create a new product for PremiseHQ under contract.
  • Checkfront - Eventually, we had to handle 6 design systems and was one of the advisors for the future state of Checkfront post merger with Regiondo and Rezdy.
  • PathIq of Plus Company - I helped the agency with branding and multiple projects, the design system helped create a reausable template for omnichannel lead generation.
  • Rank Media - I establish a design system for their lead generation + content website (under NDA).
  • Moz of Ziff Davis - I had to understand how to work with their existing two design systems to help create a new design system for one of their features/applications (under NDA).
  • Expotrade - I established brand guidelines and patterns that can be reused for the website.

Checkfront Labs, a beta testing ground I launched

Category
UX Strategy, Product Design, Learning
A lot of the projects created through hackathons, and products that needed to be tested by the public had a very manual approach of testing. I helped get this tool out to market and we've since then launched 5 features out of Labs due to overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers.

Localization

Category
UX Strategy, Product Design, Learning
Checkfront is a global experience management and booking tool which can be translated into multiple languages, but it had multiple problems.

Challenges

  • The language function is hidden away and not enough people are aware it is possible to use it, which can potentially be troubling for clients that do need the feature.
  • The translations for different languages can be modified by any admin account, which can potentially undermine businesses if there was one bad actor or a mistake happens.
  • The UI is outdated with plenty of problematic UX patterns that needed to be updated.
  • There is a different setting for the app and for the booking page that guests use to make a booking. Both are linked together and the default language is English.
  • Most language selections are not fully translated except English. This results in an experience for guests where there can be as many as 3 languages on any given page.
  • The copy in this page is too technical and difficult to understand.
  • I needed to find a stop gap method until a better translation solution is used.

Strategy

  • I led the research on best practices and low hanging fruits we can use to improve the UX of our current solution.
  • This also brought into consideration themes that other designers should learn around creating products that need localization.
  • I also proposed to limit access to publicly available translations to only Checkfront staff, and allow future users to be able to edit their own copy.
  • I helped populate the epic for easy wins around localization.

Result

Let's talk

In my future role, I want to keep pursuing UX strategy, business development, and design ops. I want to help the business grow by paying attention to the constraints that block teams and entire organizations. I also want to improve processes by working internally with the staff to give them a better experience.

You can send me an email at [email protected] if you're interested to learn more about me, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Credits to Storyset for their vector illustrations that made this page look lot better.