 And it was about how can we weave technology and user experience and work in the pace and agility that is required in today's working culture. So here we are. I work in Tata Consultancy Services, TCS. I work as a user experience designer manager there. And how desorbs, as you can see, effective desorbs for successful enterprise product company. So how do we ensure desorbs or design operations can actually help designers to make their activities faster so that we can keep pace with the external teams? Before I move ahead, I would actually like to ask you to imagine yourself as designers. What is your idea of perfect setting for design that allows you complete creative freedom that gives you or allows you to work not only in the mundane or repetitive tasks, but also focus your energies into something more innovative, more substantial, more fulfilling, productive? What do you think would be the perfect setting or ideal work conditions for you? Is this what you're imagining? Lying on a beach, feeling the sand, feeling great about the weather, doing up your designs in your own pace and space? Well, that would be wonderful. But this is far from the real world. In real world, we have to interact with people. We work with them. We have deadlines. We have standards. We agree. We disagree. And sometimes, agree to disagree, right? Have you heard designers complain that functional side always keep the user experience on the back burner? And on the other hand, technical or development side, curbing that user experience designers do not keep technical feasibility or time constraints in mind. It is just a classic tale of two neighboring tribes blaming each other for their hardships until they finally realized that they were, in fact, working on the common objective only with different perspectives. If everyone in the team had their own freeway in approaching or operating in a product, it could lead to anything from chaos to disaster. So precisely, we need a system. We have to devise a system which can allow designers and non-designers within and outside your team to work coherently, collaboratively, and smartly towards achieving and proceeding in co-creation. And a little bit about us. I work as a user experience designer. As I said, I'm managing in Product Experience Center of Excellence, which is a part of TCS, start-up consultancy services. We basically serve 40-plus verticals. And that ranges from different domains, from health care, retail, and all that. And we are responsible for guiding and leveraging the user experience and enhancing the user experience of these products. We were only five people, and today we are 30-plus. And we are multi-disciplined, multi-skilled, and cross-located team. And in terms of offering, we have customer experience. I'm sorry, user experience, information visualization, and a lot of user assistance writing, help documentation. So as you can see, we are a small bunch of team catering to various products and various services. So in a way, we had our shares of problems. As the team began to scale, we reached a tipping point where things suddenly became harder for us to manage. We had disjointed UI. I'm sorry. User assistance are the help documentation that go along with the package as a package in any of the products. So help documentation also have to be user-friendly, so that they are understood well, because these are all technical writings, which usually in enterprise product development we normally have. So how to make it user-friendly, how to ensure that in least words, we are talking about entire understanding of the products. That is all about ingest. All right, so we had our share of problems. As I said, we had UI that was disjointed components. That lacked the reusability. We also saw that once the UI was shipped out to the engineering team for further integration and replication, it used to decay into inconsistencies. In terms of documentation, specifically for UI specs, we had minimum documentation in the verge of calling ourselves agile. We used to just ship away the designs and in the product development, it used to take a toll on it. So we started asking ourselves a few introspective questions. How best could we avoid working in silo and start partnering more with the design and development cross-functional teams? How best could we build that awareness that could educate ourselves as well as the teams we worked with? How best could we blend the design processes? You know, it was very important that what we were doing, we had to blend those processes with the cross-functional teams that we worked with. And most importantly, how best could we measure success? You know, with this, we come to DevOps. How many of you have worked in DevOps or know about DevOps as designers? Okay, so none of you. So DevOps in simple words means a collaborative working environment or relationship between development operations and IT operations, resulting in fast flow of planned work while increasing the reliability, stability, resilience in product environment. Today, we can see DevOps patterns enabling a lot of organizations like Etsy, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, even TCS, in achieving the level of performances that those were unthinkable five years back. So there are parallels and lessons that could be taken from DevOps which could help us expedite design operations as well. So let us understand what is DevOps or design operations. I personally like to call it Exops as well, being an experienced designer, so experience operations. So it is to unify our design language and empower our designers as well as engineers so that we can accelerate the design and development operations. We can say that DevOps is all about optimization, systemization, and reuse a lot of design assets to speed up our design and development operations. But mind it, design operations is not same as design project management. It is different. So let us understand a few pieces of DevOps. As we know, it is about design operations. So let us start with the first piece that is research. Or research operations. How do we research into our daily works within a design team? No research in terms of all the new emerging areas, all the goal-oriented research practices that become a part, and we do not have to spend a lot of time on that. It becomes a part of our daily work culture which lays the future foundation of our DevOps in our organization. When you talk about next phase, next piece rather, it is about design. Now here, we are not talking about visual design or interaction designs, which we normally do, but it is about what are the areas we can consciously put our focus on. The things that we are doing repeatedly, can we actually operationalize it in design? Let's talk about estimation. So within your team, you guys must be having a lot of estimations being done for design activities. Can we have certain estimation models that could also help the cross-functional teams to understand what are the user experience activities required for their product based on the complexity of use cases? Can we have certain templates in terms of approval and sign-off mails? Or is it that every time you are doing a product or project, you are writing and drafting your own mails? Can we really have some templates where things can be changed a little bit and sent out without wasting too much time into it? When you talk about development operations, we are nowadays hearing a lot about reusable code snippets. Now these code snippets are compatible. Compatible in terms of browser, resolution-independent, platform-agnostic. Also, these are having the accessibility features in it so that whenever you choose to assemble these code snippets, they actually perform well, whichever product you use it in. When you talk about development, next piece is QA or quality assurance. So again, user experience, as we know, is a very subjective field. Can we have some objective assessment to quality of user experience in the product? Can we base it with scores and metrics, which business can also understand what is the kind of user experience maturity level their products are already having or what they need to achieve? Can we bring about certain audits or user experience compliance into practice? Like in Product Experience Center of Excellence, we follow ISO 9241, which is connected with the human-computer interactions and ergonomics. So what are the compliances, which everyone, even in the cross-functional teams, know about that these are the levels of quality that we need to really attain? You know, anything from research, design, development, QA, has to finally be factored into systems. Systems are nothing but baseline design frameworks, you know, with the asset tools, all these accelerators or standards that cross-functional teams can readily use into that. And these are not the jaguars. These are very ready to use checklist, recurrence, ready-rekness that they can understand and use in it. We say systems are of the people, for the people and by the people. And that's where people operations come into play. You know, nowadays there are a lot of cross-functional or remote teams that we are engaged with. So how is the onboarding or induction being handled within a design team so that a person getting onboarded can get started with the work immediately? Training and enablement not only within the team, but with the cross-functional teams because that's where we need to sensitize them into user experience aspect. How is the competency for UX being built for cross-functional teams? The next one is processes. UCD process is something that we all follow, but is it flexible enough that whichever product we are engaged with, it can easily be or flexibility can be achieved, it can be molded to their processes. Can it be done in a fast way after every project engagement? Can we have certain customer satisfaction being measured or root cause analysis being done so that we can constantly improve our services? Design operations cannot be talked about without thinking about culture. Here we do not mean design culture, but organizational culture as a whole. The culture of learning, collaboration, and bringing about a self-sufficiency within the teams. Although these, all the PCs are equally important in any of the desks to be successful, in the interest of time, we are gonna be focusing on design systems. Now, as we know, design systems are nothing but a UI baseline system or frameworks that any of the cross-functional teams can readily use. So what do we mean by that? You know, for a successful or robust design systems, we need to start with the most upper layer or the most tangible layer that is about design language. The design language, we mean all the branding, color palettes, typography, all the layout grids or things like iconography that could be specific to the domain you are catering to or product line that you are catering to. We have it in the system. The next, more subtle layer, is that of interaction patterns. Now here, interaction patterns could have modules and it could have components. Like a module could be a data table or a form or a navigation and specific component could be a data table having inline editable feature or a fixed column feature or something like expandable row feature. So all these have to finally go into ready to use code snippets. You can also see micro interactions which are smaller interactions that add to the wow factor in your interactions. That can also go into design systems. The most fundamental or most substantial layer is knowledge base. Here we are not talking about the UX jargon being thrown into one system but what are the ready reckoners that can be given out to any team to be used in their own products. They understand it and they can have it as a checklist which is easy to use, easy to follow. Just to give you a snapshot of what is the PX library we call this our design system. It has everything that I talked about. I can knowledge base micro interactions. If you deep dive into it and get into interaction patterns you can see the modules, the components. Now these components again within form we have various components login and so on. These can be previewed, they can be played around with and downloaded and assembled into creation of on-screen which will have the quality that is required to be maintained for user experience. So to sum it up you know for any design operations to be successful in any organization there has to be a top management buy-in and that comes only when designers start understanding organizational strategic vision in terms of focus on goals, people, processes and what is the organization targeting for research and innovation. Once we do that we will be able to easily identify the missing pieces in terms of lack of alignment between the partners of business, development and design and collaboratively we have to agree upon what are the standards that are required for a product team to facilitate user experience. What are the guidelines, reusable code snippets required? And that's when the design team consciously put efforts measure the time-bound goals and bring about a constant continuous improvement that and that comes with continuous learning. We share openly our assets we measure them continuously and we tweak them to improve. So thank you very much in just I could cover only this much but you can reach me on this email ID or you can even refer to these links which can tell you more about desorbs and design systems. Thank you. Please a big round of applause for ma'am.