Client
Kamer van Koophandel (KVK)
Role
Senior Product Designer
Industry
Public Sector · Governance
Timeline
2024 - Ongoing · X mos
KVK, the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce provides support and guidance to entrepreneurs regarding legislation, regulations and social themes for safe and responsible business. To inform, advice, and inspire, 2000+ employees strive to provide a public service offering that is inclusive, accessible, and safe for entrepreneurs. In late 2023 KVK was looking for a product designer who’s a passionate user advocate and can foster and evangelise user-centred design principles in a complex agile organisation.
Jumping in wild sea from a high cliff
In my first couple months, I met over 100 people. Very few were able to articulate why they do what they do. Also technology and business (driven by governance) had a noticeable dominance. It became clear how many challenges and opportunities were in place, especially from an organisational perspective; modernising the tech stack, working agile, product thinking, becoming digital-first, shaping a customer perspective, elevating design maturity, and fostering an environment where people communicate and collaborate effectively.
Our mission is: ‘Humanizing Government’ – ensuring a government where people are (once again) central in policy and implementation, and which is agile and innovative.
Advocating for the government user
Being at the forefront of the organisation, I strived to help, support and guide products and services around online registration, appointments, and tooling. Playing a key role in multiple product teams, panels, and focus groups meant contributing to a lot of cross-functional collaboration, context-switching, and fostering pollination of ideas, insights, and goals between silos. A regular day would vary from technical analysis to facilitating a design workshop and conducting user research to sharing a new ambition flow with stakeholders. Always being an advocate for the user while balancing business goals and technical constraints to create connections and benefits.
[placeholder copy]
- (1) systemic insight into the issue, (2) concrete solutions that bring about immediate change, (3) strategic and policy development, and (4) the development of the organization's capacity for change and strengthening its design capability.
- 0 to 1 experience or experience redesigning major elements of a product, applying and evolving a mature design language system.
- Prototyping: Strong ability to create high-fidelity interactive prototypes.
Translating strategy to well-crafted journeys and flows
Products I collaborated on ranged from rough proof of concepts to more mature managed and maintenance (2-5 years) or legacy software applications (10+ years). A consistent transition of old to new systems was happening in the background. That’s why I spend the vast majority of my first year absorbing knowledge like a sponge, analysing the current situation, and reviewing experts under minimal supervision. As a result, I synthesised all the ideas and collected input to tangible artefacts and prototypes, while defining requirements and success metrics to meet.
[placeholder copy]
- Usability Testing: Expertise in leading usability tests and deriving impactful design insights.
Uncovering potential challenges and opportunities
You need a goal to score. Participants, respondents and stakeholders would inform, advice, and consult when something would uncover a pain point, a known challenge, or ‘just not feel right’. Usually the artefacts and prototypes would be too ambitious and the discussion would we be about how far we want to, can, or even are allowed to go into that direction. This information was like preparing for battle. A battle where each design decisions we make should be informed, ready to be challenged, and a guiding principle for those behind us.
Nurturing sustainable digital product development
“It’s better to move into the right direction step by step compared to having no direction at all”…
[placeholder copy]
able to oversee the development and delivery of effective user interfaces across a range of modalities and domains. Taking a proactive and leading role in continuously improving QA mechanisms, feedback and reviewing designs within the team.
- Collaboration: Excellent communication and teamwork skills to align cross-functional efforts.
- Build trust and alignment through clear communication and facilitating workshops. Use compelling narratives and data to present your designs to stakeholders, clearly articulating how your work addresses user needs and business objectives.
Mapping the bigger picture in TheyDo
[placeholder copy]
drive and execute design solution creation within a project team, thinking holistically. Working with and consulting business stakeholders, actively managing relationships and challenging the status quo to drive innovation. Describing the user, their motivations, and expectations within the online registration process.
- Collaboration: Excellent communication and teamwork skills to align cross-functional efforts.
Being part of Trinity’s expansion
[placeholder copy]
Collaborated closely with product managers, engineers, and designers to lead KVK’s design system efforts. I helped define the vision of the design system, providing direction to brand and product designers by evolving and systemising KVK’s product design language. And also contributed to the Figma design system library, documentation portal, and consolidation of design system work, with a focus on the core product parts covering KVK’s web experiences.
- Design Systems: Advanced knowledge of developing and maintaining consistent design systems.
Moving from insights to strategy
[placeholder copy]
Translating reports, snippets, and data point to post-its, mindmaps, and problem statements to fuel intent behind projects early and often so conversations are on track. Followed by continueosly measing the distance between reality and intent by communicating a long-term vision with incremental steps. Basically going through the weeds and translating the ideas already present enabled collaborated people who were not yet view as collaborators.
- Collaborate across digital platforms to create beautiful interactions and experiences, bringing them to life through design, prototyping, storytelling
- Presentation: Advanced skills in presenting design rationale and user research findings.
Setting new dots on the horizon
[placeholder copy]
Working within two teams, on 6 product required me to zoom out to the high-level roadmaps before diving into the details; online registration < ideal customer journey < KVK.nl web experience < KVK experience.
In order to reverse engineer dots on the horizon we had to move from ideas and plans to video demo’s and pilots on production.
Forming a collaboration with stakeholders to redefine how the user rertieves information was a big step in… Card sorting pathed the way…
- building and using prototypes to test assumptions and collect feedback on a design direction.
- You practice curiosity by asking questions, learning through secondary research, talking to experts or others not like yourself, requesting feedback from others, and seeking out other perspectives.
- Spot opportunities for breakthrough, seek analogous sources of inspiration, and bring inspiration back to our design teams and client partners;
- Design to question instead of questions to design
- In order to understand we needed to establish an architecture a map of relationships we need to know as a team.
- Set polar opposites to define the design direction. i.e. ultilitarian vs playful / simple vs. customizable
- Show what could be (not what will be) — Explore early concepts
- Balance story to tell and story to show
Review and critique peer designers
[placeholder copy]
able to leading projects of high complexity with a good understanding of budget and time constraints, driving efficiency and holding project level design quality reviews
- Accessibility: Competence in designing accessible user experiences according to standards.
- We need ways to achieve declutter, simplify, and communicate a coherent, cohesive, consistent message.
Driving design maturity through events
[placeholder copy]
In order to devise and build solutions that are not only feasible and desirable, but also fully in line with the long-term goals and strategies of the organizations we work with. By selling the visions of… , and convince stakeholders
- product focus; Consistent, coherent, and understandable
In order to advance community engagement, knowledge sharing, networking, innovation and collaboration, KVK…
- KVK Innovation Top 100
- KVK Startersdag
- KVK AI Community
- Design workshop
Creatively articulate the insights and stories behind our design concepts.
Facilitate synthesis, generating insights and opportunities for design.
Taking the experience to the next level
[placeholder copy]
My end-to-end design work contributed to business impact like reduce time and capacity at the front-office, back-office, service centers. Also …
- Increase ease of efficiency and velocity
Shaping the evolution of registration
How much impact do you really make? How many users are really affected by your design choices? By tackling projects that have measurable added value for leading the chamber of commerce. Mijn KVK could positively influence the 3M+ visitors and 300K+ registrations of the KVK-website.
Learnings
What I’ve learned is the power of selling ideas, and inspiring people in a complex agile organisation. By working on a more tactical and strategic level; setting the vision,creating momentum, prioritising work, defining metrics. People are different, they all see other sides of a ‘Rubix-cube’. You have to learn which side to show them so they realise when they're talking we're all talking about the same thing. It’s all bout dialogue and sharing perspective, in this case to serve not only the aspirational entrepreneur but also the internal employees.
[placeholder copy]
- the importance of communication and collaboration skills in a large corporation. Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to effectively advocate for your ideas and engage stakeholders at all levels.
- Collaboration: A team player who is eager to work with cross-disciplinary teams and contribute to a positive, creative work environment.
- Adaptability: A flexible and agile mindset, capable of working in both structured and ambiguous environments, and able to adapt to new challenges quickly.
- Present work in a range of mediums and fidelities throughout the design process.
1. Playing with new design material (e.g. spatial, AI, tools)
2. Investing into targetted learning (e.g. courses)
3. Learning net new skills (e.g. tools, business blindspots)
4. Blocking doomsdayers and cynical noise
“This principal is expert at creating visibility for new ideas, products, or features both internally and externally. Promoting your work, so it has visibility beyond your immediate team, is key to establishing this type of leadership presence and building a wide internal audience is key to gaining traction. More than one of our principal designers has spent months at a time evangelizing new products within the company—both to gain internal support and to secure the resources for those products to be successful.”
‣
“ Julong is an entrepreneurial person that is keen to build and bring your product teams to the next maturity level. He has an intrinsic drive to constantly make things better, more efficient or more effective. Through his people skills he is a coach and advisor to the team members and strategic partners to educate people and develop an internal vision. He understands users' key challenges through empathy and developing functional yet visually appealing designs to bring your solutions to life.” – Wouter van der Kamp, Product Design Practice Lead at KVK
- Senior ICs capable of high-quality, rapid execution
- You translate strategic and vision trajectories into concrete interventions that improve collaboration, leadership and workability on the work floor. You co-create solutions together with teams on location, where you get space for innovation, experimentation and scalable impact. And, you help develop the design capacity of the organization.
- We count on our interaction designers to create compelling interactions and experiences through design, prototyping, and storytelling.
- As an Interaction Designer at IDEO, you’ll work on project teams to help clients practice human-centered design to solve complex problems, & create breakthrough experiences, services, and products.
- A zest for learning, getting things done and giving and getting constructive feedback.
Credits
Wouter van der Kamp – Design Practice Lead • Frank De Wit – Design Manager • Mark van Uum – Product Designer & Product Owner • Jasper Velten – Product Owner • Mattie van de Water – Customer Journey Expert • Rogier Nitschelm – Senior Frontend Engineer • Angel Sih – Senior Frontend Engineer • Bayramali Dilek – Frontend Engineer • Dean Koster – Senior Backend Engineer • June Rademaker – Backend Engineer • Aida Nikbin – Backend Engineer • Ayse Ozturk – Application Administrator • Alina Lartseva – Test Engineer • Marius Schmitz – Business Information Analist • Others I didn’t mention – you know who you are.
That’s how it felt joining the Product Design Practice, two teams, and overseeing 6 products—far from a ‘soft landing’. My role has an end-to-end responsibility—from early research and analysis with lawyers to high-fidelity prototyping and final execution with engineers, testers, and UX writers. My predecessor had 5 years of experience in the organisation and through a 4-month timeline, we time-boxed transfer of product, documentation, and knowledge. Followed by a 6-month period focussed on problem-selection — product analysis, transferring design-work and writing documentation.