KEVIN KEIPERkevin@kevinkeiper.com415 926 1935PRESENTATION PDFRESUMELINKEDIN

Senior Design System Architect

shopping.com
Apr 2009
Oct 2011

STORY BACKGROUND CONTEXT

Product and Engineering teams lacked a cohesive scalable style guide and component library, negatively impacting sprint efficacy.

PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Reduce duplicate work and make valuable sprint time more productive.

Author initial company style guide at speed and scale.

Make application deployment process more efficient, productive and humane.

THE SHITSHOW

Design team attrition over burdened remaining staff, making it difficult to focus on important deliverables. Lack of empathy between stakeholders created communication friction, which eroded trust and compromised important projects. Delivering the style guide was occurring along more important 'keeping the lights on' projects, so we were building the plane as we were flying it.

GOALS AT A GLANCE

  • Reduce Engineering Bugs
  • Reduce design cycle time
  • Improve sprint efficiency
  • Reduce Engineering Budget
  • 15%
  • 30%
  • 25%
  • 10%

TEAM

  • Senior UX Designer
  • Creative Director

PROJECT TOOLS + SKILLS

  • Adobe CS
  • Agile Methodologies
  • Component Libraries
  • Profit Strategy

DESIGN RESEARCH PROCESS

Interviewed all senior stakeholders to discover performance gaps and optimization opportunities.

Summarized findings into project scope definitions.

Organized timely project milestones, review sessions and design cycles.

The other designer on my team and I met with the product manager once a week to discuss progress on the guide, validating previous iterations and goals, and aligning on next steps.

We continued meeting to assess variable goals and to prevent scope creep.

DESIGN EXECUTION PROCESS

After lengthy stakeholder interviews to determine product and engineering goals, the design team planned a styleguide execution strategy and timeline.

We went carefully week by week to ensure each section of the guide was accurate and thorough.

After months of careful planning and execution the final Shopping.com design spec document was completed.

We achieved overall site UX consistency, scalability and recovered valuable engineering resources which were allocated to more important features.

SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME SUMMARY

PROJECT ASSETS

Reduction in engineering UI bugs

Cut length of iterative design cycles

Sprint efficiency gains

Engineering budget cost savings

  • 15%
  • 30%
  • 25%
  • 10%