The SmartX Design Workflow
An overview of core design work, supporting tracks, and design system responsibilities at SmartX.
The Scope of Design Work at SmartX
At SmartX, the requests designers receive can be roughly grouped into two categories.
Core tasks: business-driven needs, which are the main focus of everyday work.
Supporting tasks: including experience improvements to existing features, and the building and maintenance of the design system.
Within that, the design system work could be further broken down into three categories.
Improve the CloudTower component library.
Document design patterns: handling non-interactive screens and common behaviors for related clusters.
Organize the UI map: removing cluster modals, creating virtual machines, and editing virtual machines.
The Design Process
During onboarding, the SMTX design handbook provided an overall framework for the design process. Based on real business needs and scenarios, a designer usually needed to go through four stages during a full project: Discover, Ideate, Test, and Deliver. Each stage had different goals, tasks, and skills, but learning, communication, systematic thinking, and design decision-making had to stay consistent from start to finish in order to count as a complete and high-quality process.
After getting hands-on with real projects, I further refined the original process into the following six steps based on my own experience. The details are shown below.
These six steps are the standardized result of a common process shared by every project.