Being a designer at the international leader in augmented identity

I. Being a consultant within your own company: the risk of interventions that are too short

II. Growing a team while avoiding employee burnout

III. UX evangelization: a business challenge for the company

IV. Integrating new work processes within a large company

V. Atomic research: a vital working method for a rapidly growing team

VI. Working in a company with sensitive data

VII. Controversial technologies

VIII. Working in an international company

IX. Projects requiring rigorous UX methodology

X. Summary

XI. Acknowledgments

To understand my work environment, it's important to know that within the R&D department, UX professionals have a position that closely resembles that of a consulting team for the company's internal projects. Most of our interventions last a few months at most because we bill each of our interventions to the project teams that request our services. I've noticed that this strategy isn't viable in the long term; certainly, having a UX team intervene short-term on a product is always better than developing a solution without ever thinking about being user-centric, but it doesn't ensure true product quality. In the long run, I fear this strategy could impact the credibility of our teams' work because we cannot guarantee an optimal experience if we only intervene temporarily in a project. For instance, I've already been involved in a project where I didn't have time to test a product with a sufficient number of end users to guarantee reliable recommendations. This is always a very frustrating experience for both the designer and their client. The project team I was working for thought they had factual elements to integrate into their roadmap given the time they had allocated to me. I had to explain to them why the initial analyses from the debrief couldn't be translated into recommendations. Indeed, I needed to ensure the recurrence of the issues I had detected with a larger number of testers. Furthermore, I realized that we rarely had time to conduct multiple iterations within a project given the deadlines imposed on us. By testing mockups that had benefited from a first wave of recommendations, I realized that a single user test wasn't sufficient to guarantee a seamless user experience. Ultimately, this type of problem is symptomatic of large companies that habitually handle their projects in a waterfall cycle when they should be treated with an agile and iterative process. Nevertheless, I did my best to work with my company's current organization because evolving the UX maturity of a large group at the level of its organizational strategy is something that takes time.

Ideally, we would need a team of designers available full-time on each product we develop, but the company isn't yet mature enough to have such a large design team. Idemia stands out today thanks to the maturity and power of the technologies it offers. In recent years, the company has realized that if it wants to remain competitive and attractive to its clients, it must provide a user experience worthy of the innovations offered. However, opening new designer positions within such a large company is a process that takes time. As designers, we must prove ourselves by demonstrating the importance of our impact within projects. By working on products and conducting user experience evangelization activities within the company, we ensure that we attract new requests from internal teams every day. This over-solicitation of our teams is a double-edged sword because it allows us to demonstrate the urgent need to open new positions internally since we're currently understaffed, but the downside can be cognitively overloading the designers present, who then find themselves with too many projects. This type of approach must be carefully managed by the UX lead, who must protect their teams to avoid any burnout (which isn't easy). Our position at Idemia taught me to adapt and organize myself according to the number of projects I could face during rush periods. Knowing how to manage one's time and work intelligently are qualities I was able to develop during my assignment.

At Idemia, I was often called upon to intervene in a project already started by developers. They often contact us to correct the UX of user flows and provide appropriate UI for their mockups. I think there's a misunderstanding among teams about what a UX designer really is. Idemia would save more money and deliver more value by hiring UX designers upstream in projects. This would allow for user research to verify whether the technology the engineers want to work on addresses a real need. That's why I participated in UX evangelization within my company by taking part in video shoots to popularize UX and eliminate misconceptions about our profession.

Working within a rapidly growing design team was very stimulating because it allowed me to challenge our activity and our way of approaching projects. However, implementing new tools in a large company with significant security and confidentiality constraints is a slow and complex process that can be frustrating. I would have liked to practice atomic research with a tool like Glean.ly or Dovetail during my assignment to process data, but the implementation timeline for the technology within the company was too long. Nevertheless, I still used the atomic research methodology to process my user test data more efficiently by prototyping a makeshift system with an Excel file.

In my current company, we store our research work on a drive, which is problematic today because we went from a team of 2 UX designers to a team of 5 UX designers in less than 2 years. When a designer needs to pick up research work that was started by one of their colleagues, it quickly becomes complicated because we all work differently. The disadvantage of doing our debriefs in PowerPoint format is that this type of report freezes the collected data—"Our research told us this..." was true when the document was written, but it's unlikely to have been updated when it turned out to be incorrect a few quarters later. When I had to take over projects started by other designers, I realized I had lost information along the way because it was impossible for me to keep in mind all the data collected over several months, distributed across multiple PowerPoints. That's how I discovered the concept of atomic research while searching for a solution to our problem. I then organized an interview with Daniel Pidcoq, the founder of this solution, and my team to familiarize them with the concept and invite them to implement this organization within our company.

atomic research diagram

Atomic research centralizes all designer recommendations in a solution that allows consulting insights, facts, and experiments related to them as needed. This classification and categorization of information simplifies its reading level and quickly identifies the actions to be taken for all team members. Furthermore, I realized that by processing my user test data with this method, I was able to drastically increase my work speed because it facilitates insight analysis. I also noticed that developers and project managers aren't particularly fond of PowerPoint debriefs. They have trouble identifying the actions they need to implement, and twice I was asked for an Excel file summarizing all the actions to be implemented within the project. This type of request wastes an enormous amount of time for the designer who has to transpose information they presented in another format. A tool like Glean.ly avoids this type of problem because all project team members can access the collected information and quickly identify the data that interests them, which saves time for designers and their collaborators. Today, we are currently negotiating with Idemia to purchase and use the Glean.ly tool, but migrating all our research is an activity that will take time. That's why I can only advise rapidly growing design teams to implement this type of tool as quickly as possible to help them organize their work (Glean.ly isn't mandatory; Axance uses Airtable, for example).

If there's one topic that caused me difficulties at Idemia, it's the company's confidentiality clauses and the amount of sensitive data we're not authorized to discuss internally or externally. We often need to communicate about our projects as designers to gather external feedback but also to promote our activity to be recognized in the design field. Creating a portfolio, sharing a project on LinkedIn, or writing an article about a methodology we applied at Idemia quickly becomes complex given the amount of validation required before being authorized to communicate anything. The sensitive nature of some projects was sometimes so high that I couldn't even manipulate or directly interact with the product in question. Being a designer at Idemia taught me to work with this type of constraint.

Working at Idemia also means believing in the future of augmented identity but having the necessary empathy to understand and accept that capturing individuals' biometric identity frightens many people. During guerrilla tests, I often noticed that the 18-30 age group was much more open to participating in my user tests than the 30-60 age group, which was more suspicious and defensive about this type of technology. Idemia's objective is to provide a trusted environment allowing citizens and consumers to accomplish the most important daily activities (paying, logging in, or traveling). Securing people's identity while guaranteeing respect for their privacy is Idemia's number one challenge and promise. However, some groups like Amnesty International don't share this view. In September 2020, in its investigative report, Amnesty International accused Idemia "of having sold facial recognition equipment to China and thus participating in mass surveillance of the Chinese population and collaborating with services that violate human rights." This type of reaction illustrates well the fact that in each of our products, we must reassure users about respect for their privacy and the security of collected data.

a. The importance of English

Working at Idemia allowed me to learn to work in an international environment, which requires writing deliverables in English and sometimes having to conduct interviews or other oral workshops in the same language. Working on Idemia projects helped me gain confidence in English, both orally and in writing.

b. Adapting to time differences

Working with contacts located in the four corners of the globe during workshops or exchanges with the UI team in Jakarta requires knowing how to deal with time differences. Thanks to this assignment, I was able to learn to organize myself to adapt to this constraint.

Working at Idemia, I first learned to familiarize myself with work templates to learn how to build the different deliverables I was asked to produce (test guide, intervention guide, debrief, etc.) to successfully complete a project. These templates helped me build a rigorous work methodology to properly perform my job as a UX designer. My mentor didn't hesitate to position me on different projects to help me mature in my field. By the end of my assignment, I was able to challenge the templates to adapt them to my needs.

a. Skills acquired

During my assignment at Idemia, I was able to develop my skills and professionalism as a UX designer by working on varied and complex issues. I was able to practice numerous ideation and design workshops with users and apply a methodology adapted to each project entrusted to me. I was also able to face the various professional constraints that a major player can impose on its designers. I learned to find compromises capable of working with these constraints without negatively impacting the user experience. Feel free to discover my work process if you want to learn more about my work methodology.

b. Successes

I'm proud to have been able to participate in improving and designing numerous Idemia products on which I worked as a UX designer and to have been able to initiate the establishment of new work processes. One characteristic I appreciated about my assignment at Idemia was being encouraged to be proactive. Here are 3 examples of elements I was able to bring to the company as a proactive designer that strongly impacted our work processes:

I want to thank the entire R&D team for their daily good humor and kindness, as well as my lead who was a true mentor capable of supporting me