How I would design a product.
After designing 25+ digital product in 2.5+ years in various company culture, most of the time the process was not as linear and ideal as the popular “Empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test” process. Compromising a step in a process might lead to further consequences, but, doing a step without actually knowing its purpose could lead to mistreating a certain situation. Therefore, I interpret the process into more general terms to help me detached from certain methods or jargons, as well as evaluating each step before moving on to the next one and we shouldn’t be reluctant to take a step back if the result of each step isn’t clear yet. But of course the process should take Go-to-market timing, Team capabilities and Company sustainability into considerations as well.
I tend to seek many perspectives in a product to enrich the design decision, because an experience is multidimensional and most of the time the experience are affected by things beyond the screen. In this section you will find how I would design a product and my perspective towards certain cases from my past experiences.
I see experience beyond the screen.
Different companies have different expectation of what a UX designer should do. But the moment I decided to be a UX designer, I’m highly aware that experience is holistic, it’s related to human’s reaction towards circumstances and whatever tools or platform that are given to them, they will correlate it to their personal context. It is highly important to envision the ideal or ultimate experience first before we provide solutions that could be compromised by other limitations. I’m also aware that technology changes rapidly overtime, in the past years, mobile and desktop are extremely popular touch points that popularly used by people globally. But in the next years, things may change into other things like voice commands, AR glasses, smart watch, etc. Therefore, I’d prefer to sharpen the way I solve problems to enhance the experience affected by things beyond the screen, rather than limiting myself solving problem on the screens only.
Business first or User first?
This has been an endless, unavoidable debates between designers and respective stakeholders. It actually depends on how much the company value user experience as their core business value proposition. It is true that companies who value user experience tend to thrives more in the industry, but that doesn’t mean we blindly advocating users without having clear impact on the business.
In that sense, I believe instead of beating around the bush getting the seat on the table, we must understand the core business that made this UX role relevant to their context. Basically, business will create value for the users and the users will give something in return to make the business sustain. It’s indeed a mutual benefit relationship from both sides, and the team should maintain the balance between the two to create the best product with most impact instead of spending endless debates advocating their own function KPI.
How I interpret the design thinking framework.
This is the usual basic process if I got assigned to design a product. It was actually the popular double diamond framework, but I stretched it out a bit to the fundamental on why should a product be built. I tend to look at the product hollistically from its core, from as many aspect as possible because uneccessary obstacles or misunderstanding usually came from not understanding the fundamental of why we do or build things. Since most of my experience was building product from scratch to create foundation, this process might appeal more for new product, but I believe this might be applicable for redesign and improvements as well. The goal of this process is to design by understanding its core, as well as evaluating the process to help the organisation become more mature and able to adapt to unpredictable things, as tech industry kept changing along the way.
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Factors that usually compromise the design process.
Timing
Before cofounding a startup, I always thought aim for the right timing is useless if all of user's need weren't well provided. Turns out the key factor of successful business is timing, because the next opportunities are highly unpredictable, hence, we should take this factor into consideration should we need to compromise the design process.
Team Capability
We can't really choose who will be on our team unless we have the power to recruit. The engineers and designers capability matters a lot in determining the product development time.
Goal Pivoting
Business are indeed dynamics, there are lots of unpredictability. Sudden changes are inevitable in any type of company. This could be minimised through setting the right goal, or anticipate the team for changes.
Company UX Maturity
UX maturity in a company affect how it will value certain design process. Low UX maturity company tend to have lower expectation and investment in terms of time and resources.
Product Cycle
Different stages of product cycle have different approach, for example, new product were launched to learn because we lack of real data, while product improvement project thrive to achieve certain metrics because previous data have been generated.
How to keep delivering the same quality in a faster way.
Some process are crucial and shouldn't be compromised in any way, but that doesn't mean we can't be creative and get things done faster. A new team with less maturity should build strong foundation first before aiming for faster process.
One foundational research for several products
In some industry such as ERP, this method is highly applicable, because one segment of user will use several products to optimise their internal process, therefore the product design team will have to dig deep in the first foundational research and don't have to research from scratch each time they want to create product with the same theme.
User Research Library
Observe, stalk, fall in love with your users, get to know what they like and don't like, their day to day routines and put them in user library, showcase it in your company so everyone will be aware that all of their hardwork will impact the user's life. Keep it updated, it will be useful for your next features or product development.
Design System
It's indeed popular and proven works in big company to optimise the product development workflow. Not everything have to be created from scratch, we also make sure we don't solve the same problem more than once.
Create a quick way to connect with your users for fast validation
It's like asking feedback to your clients or thesis advisor, you can ask them almost anytime. Get to know them personally, save their contacts, get in touch with them, but make sure you don't annoy them. Another way is to create a community, social media group for you to ask feedback anytime.
Define design principles
This method is useful for a growing design team, by defining "what's a good design" together, we can cut endless debate everytime we found certain problem. Of course, the principles have to be based on user's data.
Create a standard together, make it a checklist for self evaluation
After designing multiple products, an organisation can decide what works and don't from their experience. A design checklist for self evaluation can be useful to train one's intuition in designing a product and the intuition can be useful if we need to develop a product with tight timing and minimum data.
Use automated / AI based validation tool
Usability testing is crucial, yet it took a lot of time to recruit users and test it to them. Using automated / AI based validation tool we can quickly get insights about accessibility and clarity score to quickly enhance the design.
