Operations
Author: Matt Carrano | Last edit: August 22, 2024
About the team
The UXD Ops Team exists to support you with the tooling, knowledge, and processes to enable you to do your best work. UXD Ops amplifies the impact, quality, and creativity of design and research efforts by maintaining tools, processes, and governance that helps the team scale.
The Operations team includes UX professionals with a passion for supporting others UXers and enhancing the overall capabilities of the UXD team. UXD Ops amplifies the impact, quality, and creativity of design and research efforts by maintaining tools, processes, and governance that helps the team scale.
Support
Our primary purpose is to support members of the UXD team by smoothing the way for them to do their best work and focus on their craft. This includes things like:
- Tool purchasing and management
- Onboarding and offboarding team members
- Advocating for the team (spreading awareness, making connections with other teams)
- Centralizing our tribal knowledge (knowledgebase, insights repository)
Optimization
By working with experts in the UX field, we can leverage learnings from what has worked well to:
- Promote efficient and effective communication
- Maintain Best practices, templates and, toolkits
- Identify knowledge and skills gaps and opportunities
Guidance
While mostly we want to free you up to do your best work, there are some times where guidelines are necessary for things like:
- Compliance with Legal, Security, Privacy, Tax and financial, and other regulations
- Ethical implications of research involving human subjects
- Data integrity
How are we different from managers?
We usually provide support, and occasionally offer best practices and guidelines, and will minimally train and remind you about absolutely required stuff (like for compliance or legal reasons). Unlike managers, we're not getting involved with specific product areas or HR processes, but rather reaching across the teams to make sure you can all do your work in a painless, cohesive way.
When and how to reach out to the Ops team
You must involve Ops when you are:
- Reaching out to people to participate in any kind of study (there are legal, compliance, privacy, and ethical implications of research involving humans or even unsolicited outreach to them that we can help you follow).
- Offering any compensation (money, swag, points, anything of value) for participation in a study or offering feedback (there are legal and compliance implications, plus some really un-fun industry- and geo-specific guidelines).
- Capturing or using PII Personally identifiable information, such as email address, phone number, video, audio, or still image likeness of an individual, etc. requires special handling (There are forms, disclosures, and data-handling procedures required for this).
- Trying new tooling or software (security guidelines come into play, and also there could be implications of storing PII or work product there).
You may also consider reaching out to Ops in these scenarios:
- Need access. You need an account for a piece of software and aren’t sure how to get it
- Be more efficient. You want to automate part of the Jira workflow for your team
- Apply best practices. Your product team doesn’t find their design share meetings to be effective and wants to improve them.
- Implement new processes. You want to make a change to your workflow, but you don’t have the time to implement it.
- Share what you learned. You have discovered something really handy that makes your job easier, and think others might benefit from knowing about it.
- Need help. If you’re not sure whether a concern or question goes to Ops, feel free to ask us. If it’s not our area, we will help you find out where it goes.
How to contact us
- If you have requests or suggestions, submit them as a Bug in the UXDOPS JIRA Project.
For general questions about all things ops, connect with us on Slack at #uxd-ops-help or email us at uxdops@redhat.com.
Our Ops pillars
The work we do can be organized around six separate focus areas that cover the spectrum of Design Ops (DesOps) and Research Ops (ResOps) responsibiliies. Each member of the team operates in one or more of these areas:
Governance
We support researchers and designers to get work done by providing guidelines for best practices that can be used at the discretion of the highly-skilled folks we support. Some items must be complied with to protect the team reputation and proactively consider any applicable regulatory, privacy, security, and ethical implications that may apply.
Advocacy
We must promote, measure, and demonstrate the value of UXD contributions to Red Hat business success. Advocacy includes activities concerned with defining, sharing, and socializing the value of UX design and research. Quantifying our productivity, tracking impact, and engaging stakeholders are also part of this initiative.
User Insights
Through user research, we generate insights about our users for application by others. It is crucial that we have standards and tools in place to make the data and insights (the "product" of the UX Research team) discoverable, findable, and consistent.
Tooling
Tooling is essential for the team to do their work. This pillar includes the work related to testing, selecting, procuring, and maintaining tooling. Automations and integrations, as well as vendor onboarding and relationship management, also come under this pillar.
Enablement
We enable everyone on the UXD team to succeed in their job by increasing team member competency in engaging in research and design activities that are necessary to the UX life-cycle process. This includes putting the systems and processes in place to utilize institutional knowledge, share information, and collaborate effectively.
Participants
Finding participants for our research studies is an essential function of ReOps. This pillar focuses on recruiting, screening, and managing participants so that researchers can generate User Insights.
Key contacts
Amber Asaro, Associate Manager
Matt Carrano, Principal Operations Specialist
UXD team enablement
Andrea Cartier, Senior Research Ops Admin
ResOps and participant management
Emma Spero, Research Ops Admin
ResOps and participant management
Chris Shinn, Senior Design Ops Admin
Design operations and tooling