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Establishing a UX/UI department from the ground up
Hired as the first internal UX/UI Designer, I was challenged to establish and build up a UX/UI department from scratch. My first weeks showed that the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH was on a low UX maturity, and designers had low trust from other stakeholders and no real design system with missing concistancy. This needed to be changed.
Scroll down
Establishing a UX/UI department from the ground up
Hired as the first internal UX/UI Designer, I was challenged to establish and build up a UX/UI department from scratch. My first weeks showed that the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH was on a low UX maturity, and designers had low trust from other stakeholders and no real design system with missing concistancy. This needed to be changed.
Scroll down
Establishing a UX/UI department from the ground up
Hired as the first internal UX/UI Designer, I was challenged to establish and build up a UX/UI department from scratch. My first weeks showed that the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH was on a low UX maturity, and designers had low trust from other stakeholders and no real design system with missing concistancy. This needed to be changed.
ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer
TIMEFRAME
January 2022 to today
Summary / Solution 🌱
After joining the DCS, I defined the vision & mission, set a UX LTP roadmap, hold workshops with the product leads, discovered product pain points and started collaborating with the development and content team. This resulted into the following:
Increase of stakeholder trust to UX/UI
Decrease of revisions of designs by 55%
Increase of UX maturity from level 1 to level 3 within 9 month
Establishing a multi-brand design system from scretch
Increase of UX research activities by shifting from UI focus to UX focus by establishing a process that enables more UX
Copyright disclaimer: The copyright remains to the respective owners of this project!
ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer
TIMEFRAME
January 2022 to today
Summary / Solution 🌱
After joining the DCS, I defined the vision & mission, set a UX LTP roadmap, hold workshops with the product leads, discovered product pain points and started collaborating with the development and content team. This resulted into the following:
Increase of stakeholder trust to UX/UI
Decrease of revisions of designs by 55%
Increase of UX maturity from level 1 to level 3 within 9 month
Establishing a multi-brand design system from scretch
Increase of UX research activities by shifting from UI focus to UX focus by establishing a process that enables more UX
Copyright disclaimer: The copyright remains to the respective owners of this project!
ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer
TIMEFRAME
January 2022 to today
Summary / Solution 🌱
After joining the DCS, I defined the vision & mission, set a UX LTP roadmap, hold workshops with the product leads, discovered product pain points and started collaborating with the development and content team. This resulted into the following:
Increase of stakeholder trust to UX/UI
Decrease of revisions of designs by 55%
Increase of UX maturity from level 1 to level 3 within 9 month
Establishing a multi-brand design system from scretch
Increase of UX research activities by shifting from UI focus to UX focus by establishing a process that enables more UX
Copyright disclaimer: The copyright remains to the respective owners of this project!
The Problem
When I started working at the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH (DCS) was the status quo that UX/UI was done by 2 different agencies. Product stakeholders were not directly connected to the UX/UI designers and UX was in general lived as a service provider which only do UI. No UX research was conducted and the main agency had a lot of shifts between designers which worked on the project - this also created a lot of knowledge lose. That ended up in front-ends which had no concistancy, user & business problems were only solved short-term and not for a long-term scaleable solution. And UX/UI was not considered of behing able to contribute to the company business goals.
The Problem
When I started working at the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH (DCS) was the status quo that UX/UI was done by 2 different agencies. Product stakeholders were not directly connected to the UX/UI designers and UX was in general lived as a service provider which only do UI. No UX research was conducted and the main agency had a lot of shifts between designers which worked on the project - this also created a lot of knowledge lose. That ended up in front-ends which had no concistancy, user & business problems were only solved short-term and not for a long-term scaleable solution. And UX/UI was not considered of behing able to contribute to the company business goals.
The Problem
When I started working at the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH (DCS) was the status quo that UX/UI was done by 2 different agencies. Product stakeholders were not directly connected to the UX/UI designers and UX was in general lived as a service provider which only do UI. No UX research was conducted and the main agency had a lot of shifts between designers which worked on the project - this also created a lot of knowledge lose. That ended up in front-ends which had no concistancy, user & business problems were only solved short-term and not for a long-term scaleable solution. And UX/UI was not considered of behing able to contribute to the company business goals.
Identification of core challenges
Directly after I started working at the Digital Charging Solutions GmbH was my first task to analye the status quo, I identified core challenges and issues that need to be solved within the next month and years. I spend around 2 month making a 2-3 year plan on how to tackle these challenges and broke them down into different steps and phases.
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Title goes in here
Low UX maturity across the teams & company
Title goes in here
Title goes in here
UX didn't contributed to a goals of the company
Title goes in here
Title goes in here
No consistancy across the products
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Title goes in here
Everything worked externally within the process
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Title goes in here
UX had a lot of blind spots across different front-ends
Deep dive into the solutions
Defining a UX Vision & Mission
I spend my first weeks at the DCS to find out the key issues in the UX team and company. After doing internal interviews and research, it was clear that the UX team was not working on the same goals, which reflected what was designed and building in the front-ends.
Why we started to defining a Vision & Mission statement ⭐️
The mission and vision is very important for an UX team. It supports not only the team by reaching company goals, but also foster the team spirit because we all working on the same goals and making decisions on the same foundation.
Planning of a first teamworkshop 📌
A vision and mission never should be defined by the lead itself, it always should be defined together with the team. For that, I setup a day workshop to go trough the vision & mission, but also on the design principles of our team. The first workshop was directly after my start at the DCS and my second workshop was after we fully internalized our UX team at the Q3 of 2023.
Blockers along the way 🚪
Defining a mission and vision was tricky in the first place. As we worked together with only external agencies. One agancy called "Lighthouse" worked on our CHARGE NOW products since years now, they had their own load and own way of working. Creating a DCS UX vision & mission means they need to break out of their way of thinking the way they did it the last years. But I saw many opportunity here to not only improve the quality but also set a first mark for the DCS as a whole.
The UX Vision
We provide value to companies and consumers by creating a positive e-mobility experience with a focus on our users' needs.
The UX Mission
We improve the user experience for people with e-mobility needs by surfacing insights, collaborating cross-functionally, experiencing iteratively, maintaining consistency, and delivery quality design across our products.
Defining a UX Vision & Mission
I spend my first weeks at the DCS to find out the key issues in the UX team and company. After doing internal interviews and research, it was clear that the UX team was not working on the same goals, which reflected what was designed and building in the front-ends.
Why we started to defining a Vision & Mission statement ⭐️
The mission and vision is very important for an UX team. It supports not only the team by reaching company goals, but also foster the team spirit because we all working on the same goals and making decisions on the same foundation.
Planning of a first teamworkshop 📌
A vision and mission never should be defined by the lead itself, it always should be defined together with the team. For that, I setup a day workshop to go trough the vision & mission, but also on the design principles of our team. The first workshop was directly after my start at the DCS and my second workshop was after we fully internalized our UX team at the Q3 of 2023.
Blockers along the way 🚪
Defining a mission and vision was tricky in the first place. As we worked together with only external agencies. One agancy called "Lighthouse" worked on our CHARGE NOW products since years now, they had their own load and own way of working. Creating a DCS UX vision & mission means they need to break out of their way of thinking the way they did it the last years. But I saw many opportunity here to not only improve the quality but also set a first mark for the DCS as a whole.
The UX Vision
We provide value to companies and consumers by creating a positive e-mobility experience with a focus on our users' needs.
The UX Mission
We improve the user experience for people with e-mobility needs by surfacing insights, collaborating cross-functionally, experiencing iteratively, maintaining consistency, and delivery quality design across our products.
Defining a UX Vision & Mission
I spend my first weeks at the DCS to find out the key issues in the UX team and company. After doing internal interviews and research, it was clear that the UX team was not working on the same goals, which reflected what was designed and building in the front-ends.
Why we started to defining a Vision & Mission statement ⭐️
The mission and vision is very important for an UX team. It supports not only the team by reaching company goals, but also foster the team spirit because we all working on the same goals and making decisions on the same foundation.
Planning of a first teamworkshop 📌
A vision and mission never should be defined by the lead itself, it always should be defined together with the team. For that, I setup a day workshop to go trough the vision & mission, but also on the design principles of our team. The first workshop was directly after my start at the DCS and my second workshop was after we fully internalized our UX team at the Q3 of 2023.
Blockers along the way 🚪
Defining a mission and vision was tricky in the first place. As we worked together with only external agencies. One agancy called "Lighthouse" worked on our CHARGE NOW products since years now, they had their own load and own way of working. Creating a DCS UX vision & mission means they need to break out of their way of thinking the way they did it the last years. But I saw many opportunity here to not only improve the quality but also set a first mark for the DCS as a whole.
The UX Vision
We provide value to companies and consumers by creating a positive e-mobility experience with a focus on our users' needs.
The UX Mission
We improve the user experience for people with e-mobility needs by surfacing insights, collaborating cross-functionally, experiencing iteratively, maintaining consistency, and delivery quality design across our products.
CHARGE NOW & CHARGE NOW for Business
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH provides customers like OEMs the opportunity to have a full white label solution for B2C and fleet customers. The complexity for me was to plan and manage a scaleable design system but also build feature solutions that have different customer-bases in mind.
The DCS has the biggest charging network in Germany and with the different OEMs, also the biggest customer base in the MSP market. But besides the full white-label solutions offers the DCS also API solutions that also needed involvement of UX/UI to build and improve the plattform.
CHARGE NOW & CHARGE NOW for Business
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH provides customers like OEMs the opportunity to have a full white label solution for B2C and fleet customers. The complexity for me was to plan and manage a scaleable design system but also build feature solutions that have different customer-bases in mind.
The DCS has the biggest charging network in Germany and with the different OEMs, also the biggest customer base in the MSP market. But besides the full white-label solutions offers the DCS also API solutions that also needed involvement of UX/UI to build and improve the plattform.
CHARGE NOW & CHARGE NOW for Business
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH provides customers like OEMs the opportunity to have a full white label solution for B2C and fleet customers. The complexity for me was to plan and manage a scaleable design system but also build feature solutions that have different customer-bases in mind.
The DCS has the biggest charging network in Germany and with the different OEMs, also the biggest customer base in the MSP market. But besides the full white-label solutions offers the DCS also API solutions that also needed involvement of UX/UI to build and improve the plattform.
Holding of UX workshops with the product leads
To increase awareness for UX and also to communicate the value of it, was it important for me to crap all product leads including the different cross-functional team leads and hold a workshop for them.
Preparation 🧭
I spent a lot of time to prepare these workshops, as it's important to get a buy-in from product stalekholders like Product Managers. Therefore I started to collect all possible information we had doing the beginning. One of the external designer (Florian Luis) had a couple of weeks before one of the workshops a user test about our current search feature in the app - I used this as a base for the workshop and tried to get more user activity and feature adoption data to present.
Workshop Time 📃
Instead of just presenting results, my goal was to include the PMs with an open discussion and brainstorming session. This supported me to get UX more established in the head of each PM lead that they can then use to get more awareness when improving our products. I also let the PMs think about our current company UX maturity. This also supported me to get then onboard for the future as they now also want to contribute to improve the UX maturity because they voted for a higher UX maturity as it was actually the case.
Results
Doing the workshop, the presentation of the UX interview pushed a very quick change in the product to improve the location and placement of our search feature within the app. The product leads started to consider UX more in their solutions and started asking for more UX imput overtime. These workshop were the base to foster UX in the organisation.
Holding of UX workshops with the product leads
To increase awareness for UX and also to communicate the value of it, was it important for me to crap all product leads including the different cross-functional team leads and hold a workshop for them.
Preparation 🧭
I spent a lot of time to prepare these workshops, as it's important to get a buy-in from product stalekholders like Product Managers. Therefore I started to collect all possible information we had doing the beginning. One of the external designer (Florian Luis) had a couple of weeks before one of the workshops a user test about our current search feature in the app - I used this as a base for the workshop and tried to get more user activity and feature adoption data to present.
Workshop Time 📃
Instead of just presenting results, my goal was to include the PMs with an open discussion and brainstorming session. This supported me to get UX more established in the head of each PM lead that they can then use to get more awareness when improving our products. I also let the PMs think about our current company UX maturity. This also supported me to get then onboard for the future as they now also want to contribute to improve the UX maturity because they voted for a higher UX maturity as it was actually the case.
Results
Doing the workshop, the presentation of the UX interview pushed a very quick change in the product to improve the location and placement of our search feature within the app. The product leads started to consider UX more in their solutions and started asking for more UX imput overtime. These workshop were the base to foster UX in the organisation.
Holding of UX workshops with the product leads
To increase awareness for UX and also to communicate the value of it, was it important for me to crap all product leads including the different cross-functional team leads and hold a workshop for them.
Preparation 🧭
I spent a lot of time to prepare these workshops, as it's important to get a buy-in from product stalekholders like Product Managers. Therefore I started to collect all possible information we had doing the beginning. One of the external designer (Florian Luis) had a couple of weeks before one of the workshops a user test about our current search feature in the app - I used this as a base for the workshop and tried to get more user activity and feature adoption data to present.
Workshop Time 📃
Instead of just presenting results, my goal was to include the PMs with an open discussion and brainstorming session. This supported me to get UX more established in the head of each PM lead that they can then use to get more awareness when improving our products. I also let the PMs think about our current company UX maturity. This also supported me to get then onboard for the future as they now also want to contribute to improve the UX maturity because they voted for a higher UX maturity as it was actually the case.
Results
Doing the workshop, the presentation of the UX interview pushed a very quick change in the product to improve the location and placement of our search feature within the app. The product leads started to consider UX more in their solutions and started asking for more UX imput overtime. These workshop were the base to foster UX in the organisation.
Building of a multi-brand multi-platform design system
The DCS is in the good position to be the major charging service provider in Europe, being said, the DCS has about 15 products under its roof and supports the major car brands by entering the EV market for B2C and B2B.
Starting with the as-is analysis 🕵️♂️
Before starting directly with the re-structure, it was important to know what are the current painpoints of the design system. Doing that time, it was clear that there isn't any concistancy across the product as well as between the products due to too different design systems and also with missing elements.
Talking to Designers, QA, PMs and Developers ⭐️
I had some workshops together with the development and QA team to identify key problems that causes big development efforts and unneccesary product complexity. PMs defined their problem with a lack of documentation of missing screens, states of screens and flows which need to be worked on along the way by setting up the new design systems.
Blockers and push-backs 🫸
From the beginning, it was clear that a better documentation and improved design system is important to improve how the DCS is working and also to be able to save budgets and money for the production. BUT there wasn't enough focus on the design system itself as it was also new for the DCS to have something like this. In the past, it was our of the focus from the company because it was fully maintained of the external UX agency.
Crafting The Roadmap 📝
Building 2 main design systems and around 15 sub design systems was a big project to do. Due to limited time and resources was it important to craft a roadmap on how we want to build the design systems. We started with building a base design system just for the designers with elements to document new features and elements, once this was done did we started with the main design systems. The roadmap was planned for around 6 month, starting with our B2C product and later our B2B product followed by the OEM design system. I crafted a connection that each design system is connected to each other, means that the more components we add, the more can we re use. Based on the QA, PM and Developer feedback was it a no brainer to go with an Atomic Design approach which we then upgraded to a IONS design system framework to work more efficiently.
Building of a multi-brand multi-platform design system
The DCS is in the good position to be the major charging service provider in Europe, being said, the DCS has about 15 products under its roof and supports the major car brands by entering the EV market for B2C and B2B.
Starting with the as-is analysis 🕵️♂️
Before starting directly with the re-structure, it was important to know what are the current painpoints of the design system. Doing that time, it was clear that there isn't any concistancy across the product as well as between the products due to too different design systems and also with missing elements.
Talking to Designers, QA, PMs and Developers ⭐️
I had some workshops together with the development and QA team to identify key problems that causes big development efforts and unneccesary product complexity. PMs defined their problem with a lack of documentation of missing screens, states of screens and flows which need to be worked on along the way by setting up the new design systems.
Blockers and push-backs 🫸
From the beginning, it was clear that a better documentation and improved design system is important to improve how the DCS is working and also to be able to save budgets and money for the production. BUT there wasn't enough focus on the design system itself as it was also new for the DCS to have something like this. In the past, it was our of the focus from the company because it was fully maintained of the external UX agency.
Crafting The Roadmap 📝
Building 2 main design systems and around 15 sub design systems was a big project to do. Due to limited time and resources was it important to craft a roadmap on how we want to build the design systems. We started with building a base design system just for the designers with elements to document new features and elements, once this was done did we started with the main design systems. The roadmap was planned for around 6 month, starting with our B2C product and later our B2B product followed by the OEM design system. I crafted a connection that each design system is connected to each other, means that the more components we add, the more can we re use. Based on the QA, PM and Developer feedback was it a no brainer to go with an Atomic Design approach which we then upgraded to a IONS design system framework to work more efficiently.
Building of a multi-brand multi-platform design system
The DCS is in the good position to be the major charging service provider in Europe, being said, the DCS has about 15 products under its roof and supports the major car brands by entering the EV market for B2C and B2B.
Starting with the as-is analysis 🕵️♂️
Before starting directly with the re-structure, it was important to know what are the current painpoints of the design system. Doing that time, it was clear that there isn't any concistancy across the product as well as between the products due to too different design systems and also with missing elements.
Talking to Designers, QA, PMs and Developers ⭐️
I had some workshops together with the development and QA team to identify key problems that causes big development efforts and unneccesary product complexity. PMs defined their problem with a lack of documentation of missing screens, states of screens and flows which need to be worked on along the way by setting up the new design systems.
Blockers and push-backs 🫸
From the beginning, it was clear that a better documentation and improved design system is important to improve how the DCS is working and also to be able to save budgets and money for the production. BUT there wasn't enough focus on the design system itself as it was also new for the DCS to have something like this. In the past, it was our of the focus from the company because it was fully maintained of the external UX agency.
Crafting The Roadmap 📝
Building 2 main design systems and around 15 sub design systems was a big project to do. Due to limited time and resources was it important to craft a roadmap on how we want to build the design systems. We started with building a base design system just for the designers with elements to document new features and elements, once this was done did we started with the main design systems. The roadmap was planned for around 6 month, starting with our B2C product and later our B2B product followed by the OEM design system. I crafted a connection that each design system is connected to each other, means that the more components we add, the more can we re use. Based on the QA, PM and Developer feedback was it a no brainer to go with an Atomic Design approach which we then upgraded to a IONS design system framework to work more efficiently.
CHARGE NOW For Business - Fleet Portal
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH also enables fleet managers to oversee their contracts, tariffs and charging cards for their EV fleet. This can enable companies, governments and OEMs to build an EV fleet faster and more efficient.
CHARGE NOW For Business - Fleet Portal
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH also enables fleet managers to oversee their contracts, tariffs and charging cards for their EV fleet. This can enable companies, governments and OEMs to build an EV fleet faster and more efficient.
CHARGE NOW For Business - Fleet Portal
The Digital Charging Solutions GmbH also enables fleet managers to oversee their contracts, tariffs and charging cards for their EV fleet. This can enable companies, governments and OEMs to build an EV fleet faster and more efficient.
Sharing knowledge with a research repository
Sharing is caring, this also relates to UX research results. Before my start, the DCS didn't had any repositories to collect, analyse and share the results of each research and user test. Time to change that!
Tooling and tooling setup 🧰
Together with our external UX designer Florian did I made an audit about possible UX Research and testing tools. We had around 6 different tools in mind but at the end we decided to go with Maze and Dovetail to build a respective emobility research repository that we can share with the company. We used Maze for qualitative user surveys and prototype testing because Maze creates heatmaps as well as tracks how long a user stays on a screen and which flow he takes to solve the problem. These two tools where opened us the door to increase UX maturity.
User Research Group 🔬
As a next step, I established a User Research Group for both, our B2C and B2B business lines that is constantly growing with users who are actively interested in improving our service. Doing the implementation I faced different challenges and push backs from the legal team and also user aquisition as both where hard to meet. On the legal side, I needed to make sure that we have a process in place how we create, manage and delete participant data. Also, on B2C it was hard to got the users active longterm to test our flows and screens.
Slow start, but long lasting 🐌
The push backs had the result that we started slow with user research at the DCS, the implementation of the user research group took me around 1 year to fully legal establish with around another quarter to build and execute the website and build the process. To enable my colleaques, I also slowly established a "Talk to the user" panel were I drive with colleaques on a bi-monthly rythmn to charging stations to talk to the user. This also increased the awareness for UX significently.
Results
We have a significant increase of UX Research at the DCS with more people and teams asking for doing more research and improving how we talk with our customers. This supports our longterm goal to become more user-centric.
Sharing knowledge with a research repository
Sharing is caring, this also relates to UX research results. Before my start, the DCS didn't had any repositories to collect, analyse and share the results of each research and user test. Time to change that!
Tooling and tooling setup 🧰
Together with our external UX designer Florian did I made an audit about possible UX Research and testing tools. We had around 6 different tools in mind but at the end we decided to go with Maze and Dovetail to build a respective emobility research repository that we can share with the company. We used Maze for qualitative user surveys and prototype testing because Maze creates heatmaps as well as tracks how long a user stays on a screen and which flow he takes to solve the problem. These two tools where opened us the door to increase UX maturity.
User Research Group 🔬
As a next step, I established a User Research Group for both, our B2C and B2B business lines that is constantly growing with users who are actively interested in improving our service. Doing the implementation I faced different challenges and push backs from the legal team and also user aquisition as both where hard to meet. On the legal side, I needed to make sure that we have a process in place how we create, manage and delete participant data. Also, on B2C it was hard to got the users active longterm to test our flows and screens.
Slow start, but long lasting 🐌
The push backs had the result that we started slow with user research at the DCS, the implementation of the user research group took me around 1 year to fully legal establish with around another quarter to build and execute the website and build the process. To enable my colleaques, I also slowly established a "Talk to the user" panel were I drive with colleaques on a bi-monthly rythmn to charging stations to talk to the user. This also increased the awareness for UX significently.
Results
We have a significant increase of UX Research at the DCS with more people and teams asking for doing more research and improving how we talk with our customers. This supports our longterm goal to become more user-centric.
Sharing knowledge with a research repository
Sharing is caring, this also relates to UX research results. Before my start, the DCS didn't had any repositories to collect, analyse and share the results of each research and user test. Time to change that!
Tooling and tooling setup 🧰
Together with our external UX designer Florian did I made an audit about possible UX Research and testing tools. We had around 6 different tools in mind but at the end we decided to go with Maze and Dovetail to build a respective emobility research repository that we can share with the company. We used Maze for qualitative user surveys and prototype testing because Maze creates heatmaps as well as tracks how long a user stays on a screen and which flow he takes to solve the problem. These two tools where opened us the door to increase UX maturity.
User Research Group 🔬
As a next step, I established a User Research Group for both, our B2C and B2B business lines that is constantly growing with users who are actively interested in improving our service. Doing the implementation I faced different challenges and push backs from the legal team and also user aquisition as both where hard to meet. On the legal side, I needed to make sure that we have a process in place how we create, manage and delete participant data. Also, on B2C it was hard to got the users active longterm to test our flows and screens.
Slow start, but long lasting 🐌
The push backs had the result that we started slow with user research at the DCS, the implementation of the user research group took me around 1 year to fully legal establish with around another quarter to build and execute the website and build the process. To enable my colleaques, I also slowly established a "Talk to the user" panel were I drive with colleaques on a bi-monthly rythmn to charging stations to talk to the user. This also increased the awareness for UX significently.
Results
We have a significant increase of UX Research at the DCS with more people and teams asking for doing more research and improving how we talk with our customers. This supports our longterm goal to become more user-centric.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Overall UX/UI strategy
UX/UI Vision & Mission
UX LTP Roadmap
Design System & Research Lead
UX Mentorship
Team
Florian
Elvin
Danielle
Roma
Loyd
Apoorva
Jasmine
Kelsey