This project involved multiple departments to restructure and apply responsive design to TI's hardware pages to improve the customer experience as well as the performance of the page.
With the Responsive Hardware project, I was one of the front-end developers bringing the comps to development factoring in responsive design and championing the customer as we made revisions in our design iterations working with the design department.
I was tasked to help lead, build up and establish our front-end process while developing the UI for the Responsive Hardware Web Application project.
I was also given the opportunity to take initiatives to improve the processes for our code contribution as well as building a stronger bridge between design and development teams.
Developers and Designers were in silos
I recognized we needed accountability and visibility to ensure that those developing weren't running ahead and going straight from the comps and requirements to development without consultation with the UI/UX Designers who created the comps. By establishing a method of visibility for our Design Team we could ensure that designers and developers are meeting.
As a result we were able to decrease development time, as key UX decisions that surfaced during development could be addressed quickly since links were now made between developers and designers.
Our Organizational structure meant our Design team is in a different department than our Development team. Both resources are coming together in a Project based team with a Project Manager and business analysts. This means that in this new project setting our design feedback loop was new and unfamiliar to our team members and we were finding that as we're moving from Proof of Concept phase to Development, we were losing feedback from our Creative Director. This meant lost time and effort as the development team needed to sift through Jira comments and our Creative Director needed to rewrite her feedback on adjusting the UI to improve the UX or meet the UX requirements.
One reason for this is during development we were getting feedback that needed further exploration or went beyond the scope of that particular "story" (the component we were working on). The developer would explain and a verdict was reached that the story will move forward, but as long as the issue would be handled in the future. However we were finding that there were cases lost with no actions taken on them.