UX Management Kit

Before launching

When receiving :( feedback

or KPI drops

UX health checks/UX debts

Dev

Designer

SUMMARY

As a lead designer, I streamlined UX workflow both for design team and non-design team. UX requires everyone to be involved.

Over the past two and a half years, I have worked closely with BCBSA to modernize its internal tools. Beyond design tasks, I continuously observed team workflows, refining processes through day-to-day efforts. I firmly believe "design with" instead of "design for". The purpose of all my efforts below is to "enable" - to enable other designers and product team to think and evaluate work through user-centered perspectives, and move efficiently. UX designer should not be the authority and only voice of UX in an organization, but rather act as enablers and educators.

ROLE

UX Designer & Project Manager
(with Olivia Chang, Zohra Jayaraman, Sabrina Lin, and Jeremiah Lewin)

DELIVERABLES

Design Process

Requirement Assessment Kit

RAID Log

UX Debt Board

UX Heuristic Audit

RESULT

We standardized the workflows and keep most design requests within a 2-6 week turnaround.

I standardize how leadership, stakeholders, designers, and engineers make UX decisions. Using requirement assessment, RAID logs, UX debt governance, and a Nielsen-heuristics audit, we run staggered delivery with clear gates and copy the model across teams.

OPERATIONS

Due diligence on UX management

Aside from spearheading shining projects, I see myself as someone who helps teams and organizations recognize the value of UX and create space for action. A streamlined UX workflow speaks loud of UX value.

Move steadily under pressure: weekly RAID log & staggered delivery

Sometimes projects move fast, leaving limited time for UX think-through. To avoid future costs arising from rushed decisions, I usually adopted staggered parallel delivery model and weekly RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Decisions) logs - achieving 98% on-time, 100% spec-complete, and 100% pre-impact risk closure (5–14 days).

Gaining buy-in for UX strategies: UX requirement assessment kit

Discovery is messy—research and planning take time, and unclear answers cost trust.

Thus, I developed a toolkit that enables rapid UX planning based on project vision, scope, and the clarity and complexity of detailed requirements. This toolkit helps designers to self-navigate and further guides teams to visualize both “known” and “unknown” elements, better voicing out 'why' we adopted certain UX activities.

After rollout, UX research adoption doubled. First-pass design acceptance reached 92%, ensuring outputs met client requirements.

Keep product experience in consistency: UX debt management

I am an active advocate for UX debt management - I make every effort to bring it to the forefront when necessary, while I dislike debt personally.

As BCBSA projects scaled up, I observed that small "enhance-it-later" items piled up and eroded the user experience. To address this, I introduced a UX debt log, and held quarterly review with product team to ensure UX remains a top priority.

This efforts ultimately added the design tickets by 25%(phew, a lot of hard works!) and accelerated roadmap completion by one quarter in 2023 (we accomplished the annual plan in Q3, reserving Q4 for review and reflection). It also enabled the product team to shout aloud design dependencies proactively without requiring designer assistance.

Before

UX debts scattering around platforms

v.s.

After

Built source of truth for UX debts & enhancements

UX detail gatekeeper: UX heuristic audit

As design output scaled, UX audits became a bottleneck. To prevent the team from being trapped in endless reviews, I led the creation of a standardized audit workflow and a library of common cases based on Nielson’s 10 usability heuristics.

With this UX audit kit, audit time dropped by 40% (~3 days on average) and UX debt logging time by 60%.

IMPACT

The UX team delivered impact through cross-team collaboration, dev efficiency, UX literacy, and measurable business outcomes (time saved, higher satisfaction).

First-pass design acceptance reached 92%

Accelerated roadmap completion by one quarter in 2023

Decreased engineering time by 30%, and improved cross-functional velocity