ENGIE’s Design Studio is all about collaboration

By Romain Petit

The motto at ENGIE’s Design Studio is: view design and UX through a collaborative lens internally and externally. Head of Design Romain Petit explains this innovative approach.

Building a community of designers at ENGIE Digital…

ENGIE Digital’s organization revolves around collaboration. The teams that work on digital platforms developed in-house rely on cross-functional teams of experts like data, tech and operations, but also mostly depend on UX and UI designers from the Design Studio. There are about 20 of these designers on staff, who are all fully integrated for the most part into product teams.

A practice community called practice Design was started in 2020 to help share experience and expertise. The concept is to pool best practices, provide a safe space where employees have time to co-create and brainstorm, and allow everyone to develop their skills and share common standards such as methodologies, design systems and DesOps.

Community time was built into the routine to bring together people with different profiles (i.e., UX, UI, front dev, etc.) to discuss cross-functional topics. Every two weeks, “Friday Studio” is held where we address one or more subjects with a variety of formats like a workshop, design crit, demo, feedback, or watch and trends. The goal is to give every designer a chance to bounce things off their counterparts and leverage shared knowledge. And because there are other sources of inspiration and best practices, the Design Studio regularly invites guest designers from other companies for a discussion or even to work on an issue they have in common. For example, they recently held a joint workshop with designers from the RATP studio (Paris’ public transit authority). The theme was “How do we measure the impact of design?” and another workshop with teams from TotalEnergies, Thales and Air Liquide to pool feedback on design systems.

The practice community’s purpose is to give all the designers a chance to be an integral part of a collective, not just to foster a shared culture and knowledge base, but also and most importantly to support one another, grow together and envision future changes in our industry.

Romain Petit, Head of Design, ENGIE

…and instilling a design culture and standards throughout the Group

In addition to its work at ENGIE Digital, the Design Studio is also managing the rollout of design standards it created for the entire Group on its engie.design platform.

Most notably, the Studio designed and deployed ENGIE’s Design System called fluid to standardize front end components and templates in line with UX principles and ENGIE’s brand identity. In barely three years, fluid has become the standard for all the Group’s designers and developers. This tool helps them quickly design digital products and services that deliver a consistent user experience.

It is an extremely unifying move to provide a design-and-develop tool for digital products that meet ENGIE’s experience and identity standards, not only because it puts the designers and developers in a space where they can share and continuously improve, but also because it optimizes the go-to market for our industry and business stakeholders as well as considerably cuts costs in terms of production time. The ROI is immediate.

Romain Petit, Head of Design, ENGIE

Another example of a collaborative project that Practice Design led in the Group is setting up the Experience Index. It’s a diagnostic tool that teams can use to assess the maturity level of ENGIE’s digital projects in terms of how user-centric they are and then recommend customized improvements. In 2021, over 120 projects across the globe were given detailed assessments. The first Experience Index Annual Report also came out. In particular, it shows that 20% more user feedback was shared among the teams that took the test. In 2022, the tool continued being deployed internally to get ENGIE’s teams further aligned on design-related standards. An open source version will soon be released for other companies.

Collaborating externally to advocate for design

By no means does the collaborative design approach stop at ENGIE’s door. There are many ways it can apply externally, for example at peer exchanges like the RATP workshop and the Design System feedback sessions mentioned earlier, as well as with students and younger generations.

In this capacity, ENGIE is a strategic partner of the Web School Factory, which trains future managers in digital technology with a major in design. The partnership’s key mission is to develop, accelerate and co-create innovative projects using a collaborative model with a unique method of pairing up operations teams with students. Led by the Design Studio, the partnership gives product teams an opportunity to collaborate with students throughout the year in modules ranging from a tech watch and anti-master class to a hackathon and final project based on various use cases from ENGIE Digital.

Lastly, collaborating also means promoting or even protecting common interests! In this vein, ENGIE recently reached a new milestone by partnering with Adobe to launch the Innovative Design Board. The concept was to form a group of decision-makers working in design and innovation to share feedback and beliefs on practicing service design as well as speak as a united voice on issues they all share. The founding members come from a wide variety of companies such as Schneider Electric, EDF, BPCE, Decathlon, Renault, Pernod Ricard, L’Oréal and, of course, ENGIE. The goal is to put leaders in digital and product design in the same room so they can collectively shape the industry’s future, positioning, and internal and external recognition.

The Innovative Design Board aims to share its vision of service design and feedback from sources that are very diverse, yet face similar upscaling issues. Our objective is to pool our beliefs, form a collective and speak as one for the interests of an emerging industry, both to the top of the corporate ladder internally and to all our stakeholders externally.

Romain Petit, Head of Design, ENGIE

To learn more about the Design Studio’s methodology, latest news, resources, and skills, visit https://www.engie.design/