Advocating for design at Mansion.com

Overview

The Mansion is a leading online entertainment provider of casinos solutions. It is a well-established company with more than 15 years of experience. Licensed and regulated. It got 3 casino brands that are accessible from most locations in the world making it an international organization. It is available as a web or as an iOS or Android App.

My Responsibilites 

As a Senior UX Manager, I am part of 2 designers' teams working with +15 engineers and main stakeholders to make the best experience possible for our customers. I play the role of a “know-how” advisor for the business and work on UX strategy and DesignOps.

-  Fostering a user-centred culture in the organisation
-  Design thinking advocate
-  Working on UX strategy and processes
-  UI kit and design system implementation
-  Design improvement for the key areas that make impact

Proccess 

When I joined Mansion, I was the first UX designer in the company's history. In the past, all the product initiatives and development were sorted by the Product Managers and Marketing team. There was no UX culture and most people were not aware of what UX is. It stayed like that for a long time and there was no problem with the old approach until management realised that design debt is increasing and all of the product elements are quite outdated. The company had to be modernised in a very short time. 

One of the first decisions was to acquire tools that helped us to design and deliver. In the past process pealed heavy on photoshop and jpegs files that were sent to the developments team for implementation. In a couple of months, we changed how we work using Figma, Sketch and Zeplin which was a game-changer during the delivery stage. 

With the new tools, we needed a new process. The decision was easy to make. We did not want to reinvent the wheel there. We applied the general UX process that is followed by most companies. It was all about the research, identifying pain points, and drafting solutions that we tested at the early stage. 

UX Strategy

The next milestone for me was establishing how UX will fit into a company that is 15 years on the market and never worked with UX and UI designers. There were many challenges for us. How to educate people about our skills. How to make them come to us with the problems. How we will answer the requests and so on.

The final idea was to be a UX team as a service. This was our north star, to enable all the people in the organisation to be a part of the design process. By involving them they would feel like contributors and at the same time would see how we work and learn UX processes on the way. 

Team culture + Research-driven initiatives = Enabling an organization to make educated design decisions.

User Reaserch Artefacts

Please find below artefacts from various initiatives we took. During our intensive work, we cover exercises like:

 -  User interviews 
 -  Focus groups
 -  Usability testing 
 -  Heat maps and analytics 
 -  Heuristic evaluation
 -  Competitor analyses 
 -  and many more.

Wireframes Artefacts

During my work at Mansion, we did thousand of scenes and many prototypes to test our ideas. Below are just a few of them from random projects.

Design System

There is no modern UI team with a solid kit and design system. My only regret was that we did not do it sooner. As a new team, we had many challenges and a lack of resources and time was one of them. We knew this is an essential element for us to be efficient. The plan was to work on this in segments, starting with UI kit elements to speed up our design process and then bit by bit working on design tokens with developers. 

UI Artefacts

The last segment of this study is the UI screens, all of them were designed by our team and my job was to motivate, mentor and support with feedback. 

Summary

I hope this article can cast light on the amount of work, energy and heart we have put into the all project. I did not want to make this study too extensive at the same time. If you got any questions about the bits presented above, don't hesitate to reach me for more context.