BOSE Case Study

Background

As the Interaction Design Development Lead at Bose Corporation from August 2017 to February 2021, I led the integration of design into the mobile software development lifecycle. Drawing from my prior experience as a lead mobile designer, I leveraged lean UX principles to enhance mobile app design deliverables.

Role and Responsibilities

In my role, I served as a liaison between the development and design teams, guiding them to explore various approaches to design integration. Over the past year, we identified and addressed several pain points in the existing workflow, leading to significant improvements in our processes.

Key Initiatives and Achievements

1. Shortened Design Cycles:

• Empowered designers with the autonomy to make design changes without lengthy approval processes, streamlining design cycles.

2. Enhanced Collaboration:

• Ensured designer and product owner participation in all scrum ceremonies, fostering regular retrospectives and process adjustments.
• Integrated designers tightly into the Jira workflow, facilitating collaboration through Jira story comments and assigning stories for design reviews.
• Established a transparent trail of design and development decisions in Jira story comments for QA reference.

3. UI Component Library:

• Championed the creation of a UI component library for Bose mobile applications, collaborating with the user-centered design (UCD) team and the mobile software team.
• Led a scrum team to refactor over 40 UI patterns into reusable UI components, promoting consistency and efficiency.

4. Organizational Alignment in Agile Practices:

• Trained the entire mobile development team in scrum, along with the product and UX design groups.
• Led training for over 200 team members, creating training materials and content, and managing logistics of the training sessions.

Proof of Concept (POC)

The POC culminated in the successful demonstration of the independent UI library integration with Bose Music apps on both iOS and Android platforms, along with the app’s platform micro-services. POC covered these apects:

Accessibility:

• Ensured each UI component was built with accessibility principles in mind.

Fluidity:

• Achieved fluid display across platforms, supporting screen rotations and various devices.

Extendability:

• Designed components to be extendable for multiple purposes.

Documentation:

• Documented and presented the components in a sample app for both iOS and Android.

Automation Testing:

• Accompanied complex UI patterns with automation testing scripts to ensure reliability.

Impact

These initiatives resulted in a more efficient and integrated design and development process at Bose, improving the overall quality and consistency of the mobile applications. The introduction of a UI component library significantly enhanced the development speed and design consistency across projects, ultimately contributing to a better user experience for Bose Music app users.