Design Enablement in an Organization
In a product organization whose ideas are valuable? Everyones!
Everyone can contribute to design. More Insights are uncovered when designers engage laypeople.
Everyone should care about the experience of their product!
How people within an organization care about the experience of a product reflects the health of the whole organization
Designers must shepherd silent designers and our tools.
We can enable design by:
- Sharing Design Knowledge
- Creating Frameworks
- Enabling Silent Designers
Sharing Design Knowledge
Lunch and Learns, Hackathons, and other engineering department initiatives are great places for sharing knowledge about design. My boss and I recently created a Miro presentation for introducing our product teammates to Figma. This presentation was well received with 38 attendees! Two of my product manager teammates attended and found it really valuable.
Enabling Silent Designers
Regardless of organization type and size, there are silent designers. Our goal for this presentation was to help these people be able to express their ideas through Figma. Being a designer is not about knowing how to use tools, but as our design system matures with organisms and templates, silent designers will be able to explore ideas in Figma more easily.
Creating Frameworks
One of the most challenging hurdles of getting started with Figma is simply setting up a file. To help with getting started, we made a team that future templates will be placed in. Anyone can duplicate the file and get started with the necessary libraries enabled.
There are many ways to enable design in an organization. For now, it is up to us to create the guardrails for our silent designers.
