When I started at CCL I counted 11 different button styles. Very early on I was able to see how much time I (and our dev team) was losing by not having pre-defined patterns or components. It was causing me to have to rethink problems over and over again. Having been part of a larger team establishing specs, documentation and symbols for Rackspace’s design system, I was well-versed in the potential upsides.
Additionally, when I started with CCL as a volunteer (long before becoming staff), I voiced a need for user testing to improve our projects. I started by introducing moderated user testing with volunteers. This was key in several projects, but over time, we needed to test more quickly and with a wider variety of users, not just existing CCL volunteers.
After a couple of years of user research I started noticing patterns emerging across projects. But it was difficult to track those patterns across studies without lots of manual work.
Over time I took the following steps to address these insufficencies.
Since starting with CCL I've created a design system in Figma along with reusable symbols and variants, as well as documentation accessible in Confluence. Our websites now have a lot more consistency and we're slowly working on building out reusable web components for our Marketing site.
Taking the design sytem step further, I've also created a number of page templates that enable our Marketing team to quickly build out new content without help from IT.
The first way in which I broaden our research capability was by applying for a non-profit account through UserTesting.com. They've generously granted us an account for the past 3 years. While it's not appropriate for every project, it's proved to be incredibly valuable in understanding prospective volunteers as well as views of specific audiences (conservatives, youth, etc.).
Additionally, after a year or so of one off user interviews I started noticing patterns. But my current setup allowed for very limited ability to track those patterns across studies. So with a few hours each week, I dug into research repositories and eventually built us an account with EnjoyHQ. This allows us to transcribe and search through all of our research. It also gives us the ability to create stories that are built from findings across multiple studies.