Overview
After a conscious decoupling from Vodafone Group; Vodafone UK design teams were left with an inherited, incomplete design system that had little to no documentation, guidelines or principles to follow and with brand guidelines that were poorly documented for digital.
The focus of this piece was to define design principles and guidance for design teams to follow aiming to realign what a good Vodafone experience should be, paying particular attention to the needs of Design System, UX/UI and Content Design teams.
The problem
There was no high level single source of truth for aligning strategic, brand, experience, design and employee principles.
Design teams were working from many disconnected principles, goals, references and guidelines. This led to inconsistent interpretations of the design system and brand guidelines, and, as teams were unsure what a good Vodafone UK digital experience should be, they developed their own priorities, guidelines and views of what a good Vodafone digital experience should be.
Defining a Vision Statement for the design language
In order to solve the problems teams were facing; the design language team and I spent time workshopping what we wanted to achieve and distilled these ideas into a simple and coherent vision statement. This was a fundamental task as it gave us something specific to focus our efforts towards and gave a solid foundation for decision making.
Extract from vision statement workshop
Setting goals and identifying users
It was important to set clear goals and to identify which users would benefit, breaking down the vision statement into manageable, actionable chunks. This gave us a clear understanding of what we were trying to achieve and who we were achieving it for.
Goals were workshopped in FigJam
Initial research
Capturing and analysing existing goals, ambitions, principles, documentation, guidance and references.
To fully understand the scope of the problem I put together a 'what we have now' view of documentation, guidelines and principles that teams were working from and mapped them all together to see where there was overlap and where there were clear gaps. Collecting all of these documents into a single place and analysing them all together made it clear where problems were coming from. A lack of digital specific design guidance linking UX/UI, brand and content.
Without a single source of truth of principles and guidance; teams were working in isolation using what they had with no knowledge of other documentation or guidance that could help them.
It also became clear that documentation was from many sources, each with their own goals, priorities and agendas. Brand guidelines from agency, predominantly focussed on print / ATL / OOH (with little consideration for digital) were being used as the gold standard for digital experience, whereas digital specific Design System components, documentation and references were cited as not being fit for purpose as they didn't allow the (non digital) brand guidelines a place to exist that duplicated ATL. Clearly teams didn't have the same information as each other. A well documented Design Language with principles, guidance and examples was needed.
Selected pages from the research phase.
Defining Design Language V1
Following the research and analysis it was important to summarise the key points into a single document that linked everything together, giving everyone the same level of access and visibility. Forming a clear view of how brand, strategy, experience, design and customer principles all work together to ladder up to a single brand ambition aimed to better align teams to the wider Vodafone ambition and setting the standard for what a good digital experience should be.
The Design Language includes:
• Defining and documenting previously undocumented principles from research, reference designs and inferred guidance
• Setting UX/UI and Content principles to work sympathetically together
• Setting guidance for fundamentals, such as hierarchy, structure and typography
• Creating real world examples to bring design language to life
The design language principles were worked on in conjunction with redesigning Vodafone broadband, providing real world scenarios, testing and feedback into their validity.
Selected pages from the Digital Design Language
Presenting to stakeholders
A key part of the process were regular updates and presentations to stakeholders to update on findings, track progress and discuss next steps. Below is a recording of one of the sessions with UX leads, UI team members and members of the Design System team.