New design delivery workflow for Kiwi.com

by Jonatan Mato

Background
As a design team grows and matures, defining and standardising how it operates becomes more critical to maintain and increase its effectiveness. Among the many important processes to tackle, establishing a design workflow and a design metrics system is one of the most critical. In this project, we defined one of the weakest phases in our design process, the handoff, as part of the bigger initiative of the design workflow revamp.

Product Design Lead/Manager

For this project, I defined the goals and processes, facilitated the sessions and processed and shared the results.

Process

To define the standardised design workflow for handoff for our design team, I first listed all the impacted parties whose input would be the most relevant for the final workflow. In this case, those parties were designers, researchers and content designers working on the designs and developers consuming those designs for implementation.

Next, it was a matter of choosing an approach to extract the ideas and experiences from designers and developers and, from them, consolidate a list of items and steps needed for a successful handoff. Typically, and especially in cases where we have stakeholders with such different mindsets, I prioritise in-person collaborative sessions when possible since the interaction sparks more naturally and fluidly, which leads to a better output.

Luckily, I was able to organise such a session in our Barcelona offices with product designers, UX researchers, developers and a content designer. This workshop was structured in three parts:

Part 1.

After a short ice-breaker, participants were asked to generate as many ideas of what was needed for a design to be delivered successfully. As expected and desired, having such a diverse array of participants meant having a big diversity of ideas,

Part 2.

In the second part of the workshop, once all the ideas were shared and displayed as a wall covered with sticky notes, we grouped them into different categories we named collaboratively as a moderated open discussion.

Part 3.

Finally, the resulting topics were assigned to pairs of participants, who consolidated each group into the relevant items.

The output of the workshop was, therefore, a list of items and actions required by all stakeholders for a design to be delivered successfully. I then processed all this information to build an efficient workflow from the different actions and a usable checklist with the items.

Results and follow-up

The result of this project was a set of two comprehensive lists of results that consolidated the learnings from the workshop and which were presented and approved by the rest of the design leadership in Kiwi.com.

List 1 - Definition of done

This list describes everything designers need to check before considering a particular design as done and ready for handoff.

At a first level, it consists of six questions defining the main areas of focus:

Approval
Use cases
Flows
Platforms
Components
Documentation

Each of these topics, in turn, comprises a set of items that designers need to ensure are either covered or not applicable to the project.

List 2 - Handoff and dev support

The second list defines designers' steps and considerations to conduct efficient and effective handoff and dev support processes.

Thanks to developers being included in the process, this set of items is very relevant and impactful.

Some of the areas covered are:

Reporting and tracking
Communication and documentation
Change management
Design QA process

This information has also been shared with developers since it is a bi-directional process.

To maximise the ease of use of these lists, we implemented them into Jira as checklists and created a visual representation to make them more digestible. Moreover, these lists of items have been used as a fundamental input for redesigning the company's Figma file structure and have led to multiple Design Ops projects like updates to the UX metrics and automation of design QA reporting.