State Farm
Evolving an Enterprise’s UX Practice
As an enterprise-level creative lead for State Farm, the goal to increase UX proficiencies and cadences across a 100+ year old company was a large lift. The UX department, which managed 20+ digital products, operated in siloes; disparate source files, decentralized design software, and a lack of iteration-controls were common.
In an effort to address the aforementioned, multiple internal sites were created, but received little-to-no traction. Fundamentally, they didn’t address the end-user’s goals — to empower cross-functional departments with the tools to make our products better for the customer.
I led a team that was tasked to reimagine and launch this lift. Through stakeholder interviews in Atlanta and Bloomington, IL offices, between non-UX and UX practitioners, the core issue of the experiences were rooted in two enterprise-wide sentiments: “I don’t understand what UX is, so I don’t feel equipped to help my UX partners” and “I don’t have the tools to make my job easier to socialize my work across the company.”
These scenarios became the advent of State Farm’s CXOne.
Markets
2019, State Farm Enterprise
Deliverable
Dotcom, PaaS
Role
Creative Direction
Design Strategy
Research
Condensing the Experiences
Understanding the Ecosystem
Within the organization, there were 3 legacy experiences whose intent was to address the practice’s issues:
CX Site - a hub for State Farm’s business partners to understand the value of UX thinking; to arm themselves with necessary information when engaging their UX partners.
CX Toolkit - a hub for the UX department that contained assets, components, and templates to increase their velocity for product rollouts.
CX Repository - an enterprise-wide archival platform for product releases and business analytics.
In an effort to increase utilization of the three properties, we conducted content audits, IA taxonomies, followed by 32 interviews of non-UX and UX teams.
9
2
Digital Experience
Architects
Creative
Directors
Technical
Analysts
5
4
Front-End
Developers
1
Digital Product Executive
5
6
UX, UI, Generalist
Designers
Content
Strategists
The Findings
If You Build It, They Will Come
Leading with empathy, we discovered that adoption was directly related to utility. For non-UX partners, the learning curve of understanding methodologies, terminology, and processes inhibited them from fully incorporating design methods into their business projections. Subsequently, UX teams spent inordinate amounts of time hunting down artifacts, not knowing where source files were located, and unclear if they were working on the most relevant file.
Asset Submission Lifecycle
Simple Updates & Submissions
Complex Updates & Submissions
The Result
From Many to One
CXOne removed the complexities of design theory. We condensed the experiences to a singular hub that addressed the needs of both users. Cross-pollination of content, clarity of use, and establishing a simplified taxonomy were the guiding principles.
The experience saw an increase in UX velocity, specifically product-led rapid prototyping. Business partners were able to empower themselves to baseline with UX-centric sprints and timelines when engaging with design teams. Additionally, product teams were empowered to go-to-market quicker, aided by a reimagined system of asset submissions and approvals, as well as keeping business departments abreast to UX processes, fostering deeper collaborations, and larger awareness to enterprise-wide initiatives and strategies.