Truss Research and Design at Two Years
article by Jesse Taggert, illustration by Liz Lin
Truss’s research and design practice turned two this July. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and a national re-awakening about racism and white supremacism, our young practice is experiencing very grown-up things. We’re trying to support each other during shelter-in-place, ask ourselves tough questions about our own participation in the power systems we seek to change, and do our client work without the valuable in-person travel to build stakeholder relationships or conduct primary research face to face.
With an attempt to associate the number 19 with something upbeat, here are 19 things our practice accomplished in the past year:
Grew to a diverse team of 17 designers from seven states who are currently working across six different projects. And we plan on growing even more soon.
Through discovery and continuous research, we’ve been helping Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) move away from an antiquated internal process (think email, excel, sharepoint) to a single tool that manages internal governance of projects. This means CMS has oversight on their current and upcoming projects, helping pave the way for the agency to spend its money in areas with the most impact.
Dove into “bioinformatics ux” on two science projects for Lawrence Berkeley Labs. One project focuses on improving the UX and technology underlying the Joint Genome Institute’s Genome Portal, a resource that provides access to over 13 petabytes of genomic data. KBase—a knowledge base for predictive biology— focuses on improving their agile process and user research to inform future work.
Experimented with discovery around team dynamics before going into product discovery. By understanding the history and current organizational structure of our client, we were able to provide a more customized approach to agile, addressing process challenges from the inside out.
Collaborated with San Francisco Digital Services on an urgent three-week sprint to get paper based business permitting online.
Started work with another part of CMS to redesign the Managed Care contract review process. The stakeholders had been through a previous attempt with another contractor that was unsuccessful, so our team has been focusing on team building and strategically using existing research to help build trust.
Demonstrated how design can work semi-centralized or embedded in cross functional teams. This flexibility is important as we meet the client where they are.
Built, shipped, and documented the MilMove Design System using the United States Web Design System version 2.0.
Experimented with how content and interaction design can pair from day one — an example of one project’s success with this approach can be found in this post about prototyping.
Created a Project Toolkit in Miro so anyone from any project can pull from tested methods to help with research, framing, and team building.
Clarified our job descriptions to be more explicit about T-shaped skills and why this is important in our work as consultants. We also improved our hiring process by removing the take-home exercise and replacing it with a 90-minute “portfolio and pair” session, giving us a better way to assess these skills and reducing the burden on the applicant.
Established a team of four design managers who meet monthly to check in on the well-being of team members and discuss practice issues and growth areas. This year, they collaborated on defining a set of core skills and a framework for each designer to self-evaluate and identify growth areas.
Embedded designers in the business development process so we can talk directly with potential clients to probe on problems and scope out viable projects. In parallel with that, we worked with our commercial and government sales teams to create service blueprints of their existing processes and redesigned them to be more human-centered.
Gave company-wide talks on accessibility, qualitative research methods for non-designers, human-centered business development, and how to catalogue research work and design decisions in GitHub.
Started a research guild to grow these skills across all of Truss so that we can continue to improve cross-discipline discovery and framing.
Collaborated with engineering to ship v1 of our Truss accessibility guide.
Published v1 of our Truss Design Playbook, which we hope will eventually become a robust library of tools, processes, and approaches to design and research work that anyone at Truss (and even friends outside Truss) can pull from to address the problems we most commonly face.
Fully embraced Truss’s Being Humans practice — in our weekly design huddle and on projects. Some of our clients are even doing this on their own now.
In addition to posts already mentioned, we blogged about using the USWDS design system, translating USWDS components to Figma, researching remotely, and doing discovery research with the government.
Here’s to taking care of ourselves and each other, and doing meaningful work during turbulent times!