Yahoo!’s current design process has evolved in response to the need to continue a rapid pace of innovation and new product development in a business that has grown rapidly from entrepreneurial roots into a global service provider.
Yahoo! clearly acknowledges the fast pace of change in its industry, and recognises that the company’s rapid growth in this context must be sustained. This has required Yahoo! to understand its internal working patterns and processes.
When it comes to a design process, Joseph O’Sullivan, Senior Design Director, does acknowledge that this normally covers three key stages of inspiration, ideation and execution. However, he maintains that Yahoo! is not wedded to having a formalised design process. Rather, it is deemed more important to strike a balance between formalised tools and methods and the allowance for designers to exercise their personal talent.
Consequently, in 2006 O’Sullivan set about identifying and capturing best practice in design. This was not about standardising and formalising processes, but about defining success. 'Nobody’s going to want to talk about process, but what they will talk about is success,' says O’Sullivan.
During this time the company began the rollout of business and project management tools, such as the Agile development process, to set the direction and guide the activities for product development. In parallel, O’Sullivan was also ensuring that design found its place in this process, and was spearheading an initiative to capture design methods and encouraging multi-disciplinary working.
While design and user research have always had a key role within the development of Yahoo!’s products, the introduction of project management tools like Agile have made the role of design in the process more transparent. 'Design has had the opportunity to open the kimono and provide insight into its ways of thinking and creating. In the better teams, we have seen new understanding for the value of the small activities that make the difference between seamless experiences and unusable junk. Now there is a meaningful place for design within a given process,' says O’Sullivan.
Luke Wroblewski, Senior Design Principal for Yahoo! Search, says that design’s role is to paint the vision. 'It can communicate the long term vision for the corporation and the impact of data, technology and what it means to the customer.'
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