Mobile Design Pattern
UX design / Audit / Assessment / Facilitation
Background
Bloomberg professional mobile application is an application has multiple application inside. It is structured as if it is its own operating system itself. About 16 different inside applications had been developed by different teams and stakeholders which eventually ended up having UX design inconsistencies across applications. This was an issue not only just for consistency’s sake, but also become blockers for user to build seamless mental model across the application. There was also hidden departmental cost since we were tackling similar usability issues in different ways in different teams. In order to address these issues, we decided to build UX design pattern library for mobile application.
Audit
The first step was to identify existing inconsistent instances across applications. We captured screenshots from all applications and extract design patterns by visually auditing those screenshots.
Grouping
After couple of rounds of auditing, we found 35 design patterns. These patterns were evaluated over level of efforts and user values by each team members in scrum team and came up with three grouping - low-hanging fruit, long term effort and backlog.
Patterns
The first 35 patterns were just a starting point. New patterns come in to picture and some patterns were merged or removed by redesigning. We held weekly workshop to define patterns from low-hanging fruit group and compile them on confluence page by category. When defining design pattern, we added context, usage with do and don’t and example wireframes or short video clips to demonstrate the pattern properly.
Take away
Managing good pattern library requires team dedication and commitment and it is long term engagement for better design system. We tried to involve as many team members as possible on weekly workshops which hindered us to make faster progress not loosing momentum. I learned it might have been better if some of the dedicated team members made some amount of progress in the beginning to keep the momentum, then it would have been easier to involve other team members later on with clear samples and outcomes.