What's this about?

How do you work as an UX team isolated in a different country, while owning half the product verticals?

  • I unified our mobile channels with the rest of the product
  • I connected our design efforts to the broader UX culture and strategy
  • I created a remote culture that felt like a co-located team

Challenges

Stuck in the present

Our work was mostly reactive, with plans changing daily. Contributing proactively to product vision and UX culture was difficult.

Many voices

We supported 11 development teams. Considering every voice in time-critical situations was a major challenge.

No borders

Our UX responsibilities had no clear boundaries, often overlapping with other teams and product areas.

Stranded remotely

Based in Vienna, away from the Budapest teams, we were often excluded from culture and decisions.

Strategy

Channel the energy

Having all those voices held huge potential for ideas and feedback. By taking initiative, we turned them into a source of inspiration.

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Make some noise

To become more involved in shaping the UX culture, we had to prove impact. We used every opportunity to create strong impressions.

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Close the gap

Being fractioned both in location and responsibilties, we relied on novel remote communication approaches to achieve coherence and unity.

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Channel the energy

Collect all ideas

We made sure to involve all the critical stakeholders. This made sure that all relevant viewpoints influenced the design early on in the iteration phase and no time was wasted later on .

Brainstorm for the best compromise

Time was often limited, so the best solution meant finding the right compromise. Brainstorming helped us explore the solution space quickly. As in this example, delivering the calendar view within one day.

Make some noise

Do the right thing

We tried to compromise wherever possible, reusing existing components. Sometimes however, as in this particular example, this would jeopardize the user experience, and so we proposed changes to the design system. We enhanced the template selection with substeps, aligning it with the users mental model.

Prepare for the future

Whenever our design was close to final, but cut short due to lack of resources, we provided implementation-ready long-term proposals. In this example, we were given the task to introduce an upsell opportunity for our partners.

In our future proposal, we contextualised the upsell in the deliverability metrics, increasing transparency and impact of the value proposition.

Close the gap

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Coherence is no luxury

Features were sometimes designed in parallel across teams, while we were also transitioning between design systems. We invested extra effort to resolve inconsistencies and maintain a coherent experience.

Unite the areas

Each of our product areas served their own purpose, but they were disconnected. For example: a push campaign can be influenced by an In-App campaign. We introduced a new section exposing exactly that relationship.

Remote UX design

Distributed teams made it hard to feel unity. We improved remote workshops using tools like Miro to better replicate the nature of on-site collaboration while using the platforms own strengths to create something special. People loved it 😻

Everyone on the same page

We aligned everyone on one common product vision, facilitating workshops with a broad audience. We shared the outcome in the form of various design artefacts. Our push journey map revealed a surprisingly enormous amount of diverging views in an otherwise focused journey.

The result

A new era of remote

Our work on remote culture paid off. Teams from other offices began reaching out to use our workshops as a reference, helping bring everyone closer together during the challenges of Covid-19.

On the same page

We started with many distinct voices and learned to channel them into shared outcomes - sometimes literally bringing them onto the same page. At the same time, our own voice evolved through more refined and structured prototypes.

Shaping the future

Our work left a lasting impression, leading to earlier involvement in product cycles. We also gained visibility across UX teams: A component proposed during this design critique was eagerly adopted by another team.

During my time as a product manager at Emarsys, Michal was one of the people I felt comfortable with from the very beginning. I was not ashamed to bring him half assed ideas because I knew he would not send me away. He would rather instead help to bring them further. I still remember enjoying that!

Ondrej Mayer
Jealous? 😐

No need to be! I got all the resources to make your project just as awesome and beyond! How about we have a short talk and exchange about your requirements?

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NEEEXT!!!