UX Design at sum.cumo
Seeking and finding relevance
Everyone talks about user experience (UX) these days, but somehow it often gets neglected nonetheless. At sum.cumo, we strive to make sure this doesn’t happen – and with success.
In this series of articles, we’d like to offer you a closer look at UX design at sum.cumo and show you why this discipline has become such an integral part of our company. Through various examples of our thinking and working strategies, you’ll see how we’re continually working to increase the relevance of UX design for both clients and users as well as our own crew.
A quick overview of the setup
“UX design” has been explicitly mentioned in sum.cumo job titles since early 2017. Although our thinking and working processes were already user-focused, we hadn’t had a dedicated position with “UX” in the job title.
The UX design team currently consists of seven colleagues. The areas it covers range from initial discovery to UX research, design and writing.
Our goals of the UX Design section
Our overarching goal is to create designs tailored to user needs and client demands, bringing them to life with our crewmates from UI Design as well as Frontend and Backend Development.
What we're proud of
In the past two years, we’ve successfully integrated a UX designer into almost every project team at sum.cumo. In the beginning, it was still sometimes necessary to explain why it makes sense to have a UX designer on board, but today, the need to include UX design in every new project is automatically recognized and planned from the very start. We’ve since established a highly effective path in terms of UX, from preliminary ideas to full-fledged design to ultimate implementation. To this end, we’ve developed a constantly growing set of methodologies that provides us with various tools at every stage. What these tools are and how they’re used is a topic for future articles in this series.
The biggest challenge for UX designers
In our field, the biggest challenge is not just making our work known, but also to illustrate it effects in terms of “hard” business numbers. At the moment, when we want to show the effects of UX design, we’re limited to using statistics on how user behaviors have changed. Here, we want to find a way to show clients how much money they’ve ultimately earned or saved through our UX work. It’s only then that UX really becomes relevant for decision-makers. Until that day, we need to keep emphasizing the importance of tracking user behavior in detail, and to further focus on the area of user research. So there’s still a lot to do before we can demonstrate the true relevance of UX design. But we look forward to the challenges ahead.
Where our journey's taking us
We’re currently working on making the relevance of UX design more measurable. To this end, we want to keep advancing efforts in both qualitative and quantitative user research. A separate article on User Research will be published in the series "UX Design at sum.cumo" - stay tuned.
We also want to continue deepening our collaboration with the analytics team, because a well-considered tracking of user behavior will help us discover new potentials for further improvements, thereby letting us make our products even more user friendly. At the same time, a quantification of user behaviors makes it possible to measure the impact of UX-driven changes – and thus the relevance of UX!
Our vision
In the next five years, UX design will become the most important driver in terms of the way we think and work at sum.cumo. We can enhance our user-centric work by showing our clients and crewmates, with data in hand, that UX design will help us deliver even more successful products to the marketplace.
The previously released parts of our UX series:
