[ROLE]
Director of Design
Insights & Empowerment, BU
How we built buy-in with market-facing leadership and our clients, to dedicate time and resources for evolving our design system and treating it like a product.
"Well [internal leader name], an improved and standardized approach to our design system is important, because…"
[1/3]
IT'S THE FOUNDATION FOR PERSONALIZATION
Communicating to leadership how a coherent approach to DLS work enables personalization, a key business goal.
A retooling and focus on how we deliver the components of our UI, is the first step in allowing for us to deliver personalized experiences to both member segments and specific individuals.
In coordination with the implementation of segmentation tooling, this work is a lever that allows us to coordinate our actions to increase the likelihood of success for delivering on our promise of personalizaiton to clients.
[1/3]
THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF PERSONALIZATION ARE…
[INTERNAL VALUE FRAMING]:
Increased member usage of third party vendors
Increased utilization of features by making them more relevant for members
[2/2]
IT IMPROVES ACCESSIBILITY COMPLIANCE AND ALLOWS FOR AN EASIER REMEDIATION PROCESS
Helping clients meet government mandated accessibility standards, avoiding penalties and improving the member experience.
The shift to stricter atomic adherence for DLS construction, allowed the team to form perspectives on style and atom level components, which in turn made updating identified accessibility issues easier to correct and immediately propagate across the product.
For instance, adding an underline state to link items required updating only one item in the component repo, as opposed to every individual state those links existed across the product.
[2/2]
IT IMPROVES ACCESSIBILITY COMPLIANCE AND ALLOWS FOR AN EASIER REMEDIATION PROCESS
BUSINESS BENEFITS OF PERSONALIZATION:
[INTERNAL] Faster remediation for issues identified at the “style” level of the DLS (eg. color, type, etc.)
[CLIENT] Lower risk of penalties for not meeting WCAG standards
[CLIENT] Fewer reports of accessibility issues from their own clients (eg. employer groups or government)
[3/3]
IT GETS US TO FASTER CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT CYCLES
A more flexible, thought-out approach to componentization allows us to more quickly address member needs and improve CX metrics that our clients are already measuring inside their platforms.
As our client’s focus on CX metrics increased, it became easier to get internal alignment with other teams, namely anyone market facing (eg. account management, sales, etc.), to understand how dedicated DLS work also met our client’s needs to more quickly respond to member feedback around suboptimal UX.
[3/3]
IT GETS US TO FASTER CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT CYCLES
BUSINESS BENEFITS OF PERSONALIZATION:
Here we focused primarily on reducing likelihood of churn, framing faster continuous improvement cycles as a way to more rapidly address UX complaints our client’s members identified.
You'll notice I didn't mention "Reducing Costs" as one of the framing devices. We did, in fact, call that out early on, but that's not something any leader cares about from a meaningful perspective. You have to think about the state of your organization and the larger contexts and business goals they're moving through. At the time of this updated approach to our DLS, the company was angling for an acquisition. Therefore, there "Protecting Revenue," reducing likelihood of churn, plays on a person's fear, especially in as client constrained a pond as American healthcare. Opposite fear is hope and that's where hinting at "Increased Revenue" came in. Play into people's hopes and fears when talking about the benefits of design – not single, static metrics that have no bearing on another group's outcomes or goals.