TransUnion: Building Design Culture Into Big Business

As the Head of UX and Design, my main mission is to help build a design culture into big business and inspire cross-department teams to work together in solving complex problems. When TransUnion Consumer Interactive made a conscious decision to invest in design in late 2019, it gave us a chance to build, define and prove that being human centered can lead to great business outcomes.

The New Kids On The Block

Being a new team in a legacy organization meant we needed to listen, learned, and empathized with the business in order to learn exactly what motivated them in terms of commitment. Our secret was to collect as many small wins as possible all under tight timeframes. Combining speed, scrappiness, and quality enabled us to show the value of design within an instant whether that be UI updates or conducting User Research to prove out a hypothesis. By the end of year one, we had our own design thinking approach in place, were recognized by the business, established key cross-department partnerships and had earn a seat at the table.

Linking Our Design Solutions To Business Outcomes

The way we look at it is if we could focus on making our products beautiful, work seamlessly, reliable, usable, and meaningful it will lead to happier consumers. And if consumers have positive emotional reactions to our products it leads to happier executives because it addresses everything they care about: Increasing revenue, decreasing costs, increasing new business/market share, increasing revenue from existing customers and satisfied customers.

Putting Design Front And Center

Because our design team principles revolved around business, human-centered design and education we created an open forum called the UX Design General Assembly where folks from all departments could get a glimpse of the work in progress. This involved sharing our rolling research insights mean to build empathy for our end-users, wireframes, stakeholder feedback, UI demos, and so much more. Our monthly assembly now have over 75 active viewers who join across the world. To ensure, we’re delivering value we send out surveys to get continuous feedback on the work and our overall team’s performance.

Celebrating The Work

Given we’re two years in our team’s existence, we design and create a custom theme end of the year recap where we showcase notable projects we took on with cross-department teams. From our mobile app to our web-based products, to deep user research studies, to video concept work, to even ideation workshops we’ve hosted, we want to celebrate the great work we take on each quarter. To learn more about how we celebrate our work at year’s end check out this Medium post.

Curious To See What We’re Up To?

While I cannot share our work here, we can certainly talk more about it. And, if you’d like to learn more about how we’re transforming our culture using design thinking email me at chavab4228@gmail.com

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