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, 2200 employees strive to provide a public service offering — that is inclusive, accessible, and safe for entrepreneurs. In late 2023 KVK was looking for a designer who’s a passionate user advocate and can foster and evangelise user-centred design principles in a complex agile organisation.
Starting at the Chamber of Commerce
Joining the Product Design Practice, two teams, and overseeing 6 products was far from a ‘soft landing’. My role has an end-to-end responsibility — from working closely with analysts, researchers and lawyers in early discovery to 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, knowledge, etc. Followed by a 6-month period focussed on problem-selection — product analysis, transferring design-work and writing documentation.
Advocating for the aspiring entrepreneur
At the forefront of the organisation, I continuously helped guide and enhance our products and services around online registration, appointments, and tooling. Playing a key role in multiple product teams, work groups, and panels meant contributing to a lot of cross-functional collaboration and pollination of insights, ideas and goals between silos. A regular day could differ from data-analysis to facilitating a design workshop and conducting user research to pitching a new user-flow to stakeholders.
Balancing incremental steps and vision
Being surrounded with people and teams who manage and maintain mature (2-5 years old) to legacy software applications meant there was a consistent flow of old to new systems happening in the background. I was struck by how much legislation and regulations influenced the more long-term work and thinking within the chamber. Before launching and maintaining my own features, I spend a majority of my time listening and absorbing knowledge like a sponge with multiple parallel working-lanes and a fast paced design process under minimal supervision.
Working towards tangible results
Define and meet success metrics
to generate proposals or solutions that meet the requirements of the project scope, with appropriate visual and verbal articulation, applying relevant guidelines
Make informed design decisions
able to define Interaction design visions, guidelines and principles that conform or exceed industry standards.
Rally the team together, define the criteria of our principles, diverge, converge, refine and apply (UX Laws)
Supporting continuous development
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
Mapping the bigger picture in TheyDo
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.
Write intuitive copy that helps guide
Being part of sales processes and helping write quotes
Being part of Trinity’s expansion
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.
Going from findings to insights
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.
Setting new dots on the horizon
Building a new content funnel
Forming a collaboration with stakeholders to redefine how the user rertieves information was a big step in… Card sorting pathed the way…
Review and critique peer designers
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
Driving design maturity through events
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
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.
Learnings
What I’ve learned is that by proposing new ideas to new minds, creating momentum, make the work prioritised, (whether it's metrics, qualitative anecdotes, or ethics) 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 and in this case enabling features to serve better both the aspirational entrepreneur and internal employees i.e. front-office (and indirectly back-office).
“ …” – Wouter van der Kamp, Product Design Practice Lead at KVK
Credits
Wouter van der Kamp – Product Design Practice Lead • Frank De Wit – Design Program 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 • Pradyumna Tomar – Test Engineer • Marius Schmitz – Business Information Analist • Others I didn’t mention – you know who you are.