About Beamery:
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B2B enterprise unicorn in HR tech, 300+ employees
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AI-powered talent platform for Fortune 500 companies
My role and the people involved:
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Role: Product design lead
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Responsible & Accountable: me
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Contributing: Design, Marketing
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Informed: Executives, Sales, Product teams
The problem:
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The UI had no cohesive visual style
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The development of the design system was blocked by the lack of foundations
Main goals:
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Develop a visual language to become a foundation for the design system.
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“Modernise” the Beamery UI (the request from the leadership).
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Make the visual language used in the product more aligned with the Beamery brand.
The approach:
1. Identify brand attributes
I've collated the inputs from various functions, from Sales and Customer Support to Marketing and the C-Suite to decipher the essence of the Beamery brand. Then I boiled that down to four key attributes and graphic elements.
2. Discover the characteristics of "modern UI”
I conducted a series of workshops with the design team to develop a common understanding of “modern UI” and formulate its tangible characteristics.
3. Develop the vision
In the next series of workshops, designers developed a vision of their products in the new style, relying on the outputs of the first two steps as a foundation. As a result, we had enough exploration and data to converge into a single direction.
4. Refine the outputs into a cohesive style
With the key principles and goals of the project (i.e. modernisation, brand alignment, unblocking the design system) in mind, I helped to resolve the open questions and finalise the development of the visual language.
Outcomes:
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The new design direction has been developed and approved within a month
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Product Designers have immediately started utilising and evolving the new visual language in their work
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The development of the design system has been unblocked
Learnings:
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Even though the process went super-smooth, the fact that we landed on a single design direction so fast could mean we haven't explored broad enough. Next time I'd encourage the working group to diverge and experiment a lot more.
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Next time I'd make Marketing Design a true collaborator in this process, not just a consultant. The process would've benefited from the unique creative perspective and brand expertise of marketing designers.