Summary
Right Thing? Designed Right? Built Right? How do you know it’s designed right? The answer: Effective design planning and management. Our session introduces a design planning and management tool and discusses how it can empower enterprise teams with clarity and data at every altitude, so you know you are designing the right thing right. Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at design information management and tooling that will help you execute UX at scale.
Key Insights
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Design information for enterprise products is dispersed across multiple systems like PDFs, Figma files, Slack messages, and Confluence pages, making it hard to find and connect relevant inputs.
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Design teams must operate at different altitudes—from pixel-level UI details to integrated company-wide strategy—each requiring different but connected information.
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Visibility across altitudes and related design inputs is crucial; isolated context leads to suboptimal design decisions and inefficiencies.
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A single source of truth is less effective than a constellation of interconnected information hubs tailored for different types of inputs and stakeholders.
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The missing vital hub in many organizations is a design planning and management (DP&M) tool that manages evolving design deliverables and their relationships.
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Limina uses Airtable as their DP&M tool integrated with Jira for project management and Figma for design, chosen for its flexibility and relational database capabilities.
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All designers share responsibility for maintaining and updating the DP&M system to ensure accurate, current design information available across the team.
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Using DP&M tools reduces context switching, supports data-driven design, helps enforce UX consistency, and reveals gaps in requirements or process coverage.
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DP&M dashboards and multiple views help design leads and teams monitor progress, manage action items, and identify opportunities for alignment and consolidation across products.
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Despite advances, no comprehensive end-to-end design planning and management framework exists yet; teams must currently build flexible in-house solutions to bridge gaps.
Notable Quotes
"Research and insights are only part of the information schema we’re talking about. There’s a vastness of complexity in design information we need at our fingertips."
"Design teams must operate across a range of altitudes, from the big picture down to the pixel, and that scale determines the inputs needed."
"It’s not enough to just see inputs at the altitude you’re working at; you need visibility into the inputs around you for proper context."
"We don’t need a north star. We need a constellation that allows us to see the full picture."
"The design planning and management tool pulls together all necessary design reference material and deliverables, focusing on actively tracked info and their relationships."
"This DP&M tool is not just another knowledge base, it’s a living database that supports managing relationships and parsing information into views tailored to user roles."
"All designers have responsibility to communicate upstream and downstream, sharing their work context and contributing to the DP&M system."
"The DP&M tool has everything designers wish they could see from Jira and Figma, but often can’t because it’s either inappropriate or too hard to keep updated in those tools."
"Dashboards in the DP&M system let design leads visualize all screens, components, templates, and content types in context, identifying inconsistencies or opportunities."
"Planned right and managed right is the key to designing it right, not just designing the right thing and building it right."
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