Tools for DesignOps Managers That Will Help You Grow Your Team

If you haven’t noticed already, technology has become a big part of society in the last decade-plus. In addition, it’s also taken over in the working world - and that trend looks set to continue as we look ahead to the future. It seems as if every industry is experiencing a revolution of some sort, and in the design realm, that’s certainly the case.

Today, we want to continue discussing DesignOps (aka Design Operations). The aim of the game is to maximise the creative flow of designers, with DesignOps managers guiding the design processes and tracking what’s going right and what’s going wrong. In addition, they’ll be tasked with monitoring their team, hoping to bring out even greater results for them.

Today, we want to take a look at some of the tools for DesignOps that are out there and why it’s important to utilise them. Of course, we’ll be scratching the surface regarding what’s possible, but it’s always nice to take a step back and analyse the state of play.

With that being said, let’s get into it.

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The importance of DesignOps tools

Design tools, on their own, focus on creating visual designs and actually producing content. On the flip side, DesignOps tools are all about management. It’s about taking the design process and making it easier to deal with, encouraging collaboration and ensuring that teams come together and succeed in every department - from planning to execution.

The designers, they say, are responsible for the quality of the work, but DesignOps are responsible for most of the other facets of the game. Sure, you’ve got traditional design tools such as Sketch or Adobe Illustrator, but this goes a little bit further beyond that. They give you the ability to coordinate, communicate and form the perfect plan of attack for every piece of work you complete.

In summary, we really don’t think you can overstate the importance of DesignOps tools, and the best part about that is there are so many good ones out there. It’s a case of figuring out what works for you and caters to your needs.

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Key DesignOps tools

There are plenty of tools out there that can provide great assistance with your DesignOps journey, but we’re opting to single out a couple that we believe to be really beneficial in the context of the industry as a whole. As time passes, the hope is that integrating such techniques can not only boost your team’s spirits but also dramatically increase productivity.

UXPin Merge

Suppose you want to ensure compliance with organisational standards, and you want to do so as professionally as possible. In that case, Merge from UXPin is arguably the best way to do just that. It helps to unify design systems, meaning that everyone from developers to designers and beyond can work within the same system, which is far neater for everyone involved.

Generally, Merge lets you use components that already exist in the code repository without putting in any extra work. It also means you don’t have to redraw elements that have already been coded, and in terms of the workflow itself, you’ll quickly find that everything runs like clockwork - decreasing the amount of headaches you have to deal with along the way.

Project management

While designers are incredibly talented individuals, they aren’t always the most organised. Yes, that’s a bit of a sweeping statement, but stay with us here. Project management is a crucial part of the job, and if you want tools that will really help you along in that regard, it’s definitely worth testing the waters with a couple of different tools.

If you want your team to operate at their maximum level, try out the likes of Trello, Asana and Jiri. They are laid out differently, and one may be to your specific taste more so than others, but the heart of what they do is simple: they keep things in order. Instead of being stuck with a backlog or without any kind of structure, you’re being handed a solution on a silver platter.

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Team building and collaboration

They say there’s no ‘I’ in team, and they’re right. In design work, getting wrapped up in what you’re doing can be easy instead of opening yourself up and allowing for honest, comforting collaboration. For us, DesignOps allows you to break down such barriers with morale-boosting tools and aids that can be integrated perfectly into the framework.

It may sound silly or cheesy, but it really does come down to improving the overall mood of your team. There are some great tools out there, such as Pizzatime, which provides food and drink and remote experience days for teams to come together and share thoughts and ideas. There’s also TriviaMaker, which, you guessed it, offers up a few quick brain teasers for the entire gang.

Regarding work-based collaboration, UXPin’s Comments feature allows you to collaborate on projects regardless of where your teammate is in the world. It’s easy to put a comment down for someone to take action on and mark it as complete when it’s all done. You can also use it to take notes, discuss different tactics, and generally get things finished quicker and more efficiently.

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User experience

The user experience and general accessibility of these tools should be at the top of the priority list. If you’ve got a simpler system that has worked for a long time but isn’t quite enough to help take you to the next level, getting your team on board can sometimes be difficult. Therefore, you need to be 100% confident in the comfortability of using these new systems.

With UXPin, for example, you can automate tasks like design specs and CSS generation, making the design handoff process more efficient - and you can do so without much hassle at all. You’ve also got user-friendly design structures such as the built-in contrast checker and colour blindness simulator, which are both practical and considerate in equal measure.

You can build a signup and login sequence that works for everyone, access data easily, and be happy in the knowledge that things are running accordingly 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

If you take a minute to step back and look at the bigger picture, a positive user experience really is critical for success - and we’d urge you to remember that.

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Final thoughts

At this stage, it goes without saying, but DesignOps is pretty great. It offers a range of helpful ways in which you can streamline your processes and, in the long run, have a more efficient way of doing things. It frees up how designers can manage their time, and with society needing design work more than ever, that can only be a good thing in our book.

These tools can give you everything you need to grow, improve and take your company to the next level in almost every way imaginable. Sure, you need to stay on top of things, but this will certainly get the ball rolling.

Our focus continues to be on providing top-tier unlimited graphic design services. With a committed team of professionals, we’re here to make your life easier and give you the kind of design options that’ll blow your mind.

If you want to learn more, please check out how we help in-house teams here. If you have any questions, get in touch!