Fundamentals of design and product building processes are explained with ton of examples and quotes from leading designers. Highly recommended read for designers and entrepreneurs who have just started out building their design team.
My Notes:
Chapter 01 - Guess less
Software success depends on the collection of variables: the right product with the right features for the right audience in the right market.
"If you’re going to solve a problem, you want sufficient information to solve it." Erika Hall (Mule Design)
What people say they do and what they actually do are different. Observe then derive insights. Don’t enquire and derive insights. Research fast and make things. Goal is not to make products prettier but to generate real value by solving customer needs.
Conducting Research:
Quantitative: Techniques to learn how customers act and aggregate stats about customer cohorts.
Qualitative: Techniques that tell us about the qualities of a product or experience. Customer interviews, for example, give us insights about how a customer feels, which can provide a lot of insight into what motivates their behavior.
PRO TIP –– Quantitative and qualitative findings numbers give the illusion of certainty, but they can be misleading if not verified with qualitative findings.
Surveys:
Adhoc Surveys:
Clear learning goals. Keep it short.
Avoid “Nice-to-know” questions & don’t ask someone for customer data that you already have access to.
Randomize answers to question to avoid response order bias.
Add open-ended questions like, “Is there anything else you want to tell us?”
Run a pilot test of your survey with a small sample of people before sending it out. Will help find questions with missing response options and vague questions.
Writing the email for survey should be written carefully. Teams doing a deep dive on a feature or topic. PRO TIP —Smarter response filtering Ask a question or 2 at the beginning of the survey to help you filter responses later. For example, a question like, “How old is your business?” or, “About how many people are in your organization?” can expose different responses from various customer cohorts.
Good for continuous fresh insight streaming. Use tools like Zapier to forward all survey responses into a shared Google Sheets where your team can search through all responses.
Some use-cases:
After account opening: Net Promoter Score: Your customers’ loyalty to your brand. Tool: Delighted
After sign up: Know why customers signed up, and from which competitor they’re switching. Helps marketing team identify the right brand language. Send this within a few days of sign up.
After account closing: Find out why they’re leaving. Is it you or just circumstance? Are they switching to a competitor? Link to your survey on the page in your app confirming their account is closed. Topic-specific: Ethnio or Qualaroo to deliver a micro-survey to specific customers. By placing a small code snippet on a carefully selected page in your Knowledge Base, you can find a customer with expertise on almost any topic.
Annual Surveys: To collect customer data to inform projects throughout the year.
Get insights into the daily lives of your customers and find opportunities for designing products that will solve their problems.
Tips:
Talk to your customers a couple of days per month with a limited number of people. Assign a person to take notes. Notice any change in the subject, raised voice, use of profanity, leaning in to emphasize a point. Bring a voice recorder to capture the interview. Don’t delve too much into details, every interview will give 1-2 meaningful insights.
Support guys: They have a good intuition of what’s working and not.
Sales: They have insights about product shortcomings and data about every potential customer.
Marketing: Analytics often falls to the marketing team to track. Get access to Google Analytics and other tools that help you understand customer pathways and raise questions about interesting customer behaviors.
Customer service: They have actionable information for refining your product.
Data science: Get access to the customer database. A goldmine of information. This team will be your most treasured ally
Engineering: Curious about which integrations customers connect first to your app or failure rates of a particular workflow? Your engineering colleagues can probably log that data for you and have the app email you a report. Full story is like a DVR for customer sessions in your app. It’s a fast way to learn how you can improve your product.
Tools:
Use Intercom's customer feedback features to know your customers who have taken specific actions.Use Builtwith to learn about your customers choice of tools for their websites/businesses/personal use.
Chapter 02 - Story First
Unite design teams around a shared product vision done achieved with a clear and compelling story. A vision of the future presented as a story that answers, “Why are we building this?”.
Derive product stories from customer research. Important moments of frustration, aspiration, and triumph are potential plot points in your story.
Traits of a good product story:
Very high level
Answers a simple question: how will this product fit into the lives of others? Demonstrate how a cast of characters (your customers) behave in specific scenarios. Show how your product creates value in your customers’ lives.
Show people the future that can be created if everyone works together. Explain it with visuals - storyboard, map, comic, series of illustrations, or a video.
User Journey Map:
Identify the main character’s goals and problems. Be specific where possible.
Quotes from customers and specific findings from research will give your user journey map details that will bring it to life.
Point out the hurdles the user must overcome to get to the resolution they desire. Include the devices and channels of communication involved in the user’s journey.
Speech bubbles let you expose the customer’s thoughts and words along the way.
Storyboards
A collection of illustrated panels with short descriptions depicting key points in a story. Often used by animation and film studios to work through narrative concepts. First developed at Walt Disney Studios during the production of Three Little Pigs in 1933.
Quick tips:
Post sticky notes in a grid on a wall and sketch out each scene with Sharpies.
Stick figures will suffice
Online tools like Boards let you piece together a storyboard quickly and share it with colleagues.
Avoid specifics like a detailed UI—focus on how the product needs to fit into the lives of your customers, not how the product looks.
User Personas
User Personas are archetypal representations of key customer segments. Personas can take many forms, from documents to posters, but they’re most effective when visible.
Quick tips:
Line up interviews with customers in each key segment. Analyze the findings from your interviews to determine common traits and goals within each customer segment.
Create a profile representative of the largest common groupings. Refresh often, as personas are merely a snapshot in time and not built to last.
Job Stories
Job stories are only concerned with a customer’s motivations within a specific context.
Quick tips:
Job stories are based on customer interviews that employ a very specific technique that takes the customer back to the moment of purchase to expose the situations and motivations that lead to their decision. A job story follows a simple structure: A job story framework When ___________ I want to ___________ so I can ___________. Identify the situation, motivations, and desired outcomes related to the customer’s purchase.
Additional Reading: The Innovator’s Dilemma. Jobs to Be Done framework developed by Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School.
Create a job story for each customer interview. Compare job stories for each interview to find patterns.
Chapter 03 - Pencils before pixels
Think divergently
“If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there.” Frank Gehry — GEHRY PARTNERS
The power of a pencil:
It’s the inverse of a computer; it’s simple and limited in functionality, but its limitations make it effective. Pencils are inclusive. not just for designers—anyone can use a pencil to express their ideas clearly. Pencils are low-fi. Quick sketches give no impression of a complete thought, pencils aren’t fiddly. Instead of getting lost in software settings or style, you’ll focus on your ideas. Pencils are fast. You can explore vastly different solutions to the same problem in minutes.
Quick tips:
Create a team sketching activity like 6-8-5: you and your colleagues will generate 6 to 8 design solutions per person in just 5 minutes. Here’s how it works: Get your team together—designers, engineers, product managers. Limit the group to 8 or less. Give each person a sheet of A5 or 8.5” x 11” paper. The paper will be folded 3 times to create 6 boxes (for 6 sketches). Frame the problem for everyone, and clearly state the desired outcomes of this project. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and instruct everyone to sketch solutions individually. When the timer goes off, it’s time for each team member to present his or her ideas. The conversation about each idea is important here. Critical feedback will help you see what ideas are best. Working together to solve problems gives everyone shared ownership in the product vision.
The right tools at the right time
With fine line pens and mechanical pencils, you’ll be prone to create detailed sketches, which are slower. With fat markers, it’s pretty hard to draw a detailed UI. Instead, you have to focus on the workflow and how people will use your product. Use a medium Sharpie or a Staedtler Triplus Fineliner. Loose paper works best for sketches. To sketch UI concepts in detail; find Copic gray markers add depth and clarity to sketches.
Chapter 04 - Show and tell
Create a culture of feedback
Feedback is the lifeblood of a healthy design team.
Benefits:
Informs the design process
Leads to better products
Helps designers grow (learn to think more clearly about their design decisions and become comfortable articulating their ideas)
Avoid spending too much time on a design that may have significant flaws.
Gives us multiple perspectives on a single problem
Creating a culture of feedback:
Invest in developing the language designers need to deliver constructive feedback, thereby improving the perspectives on the qualities of good design. For instance, rather than hearing, “I like the type you’ve chosen,” you’ll begin to notice statements like, “The type selection feels trendy, which contradicts the project’s goal of inspiring trust in the content.”
Do's and Don'ts:
Work on building a rapport with fellow designers. Temper overly critical feedback early on. Work your way into more direct criticism once rapport and trust are established.
The design studio is where your team’s ideas can be shared, debated, retooled, and celebrated. Make it clear to your team that the studio walls are not a gallery—this is workspace! Invest in a large format printer and get the whole team connected. Print design work daily and post to your studio walls for scheduled design reviews and casual conversations. You can buy 8-foot by 4-foot sheets of foam core and lean them against your walls. Get some nice Washi tape to post your designs.
Start with low fidelity to explain the direction of your designs. Pixel perfect is misleading and feels like your work is finished, which will inhibit feedback. Work that’s lower fidelity (with notes) scribbled on it will make it clear to all that you’re still working through ideas.
Formalizing the feedback process:
Design reviews:
When they should happen? – Early, midway, and at the end of a project
Who should be there: 7 people (max.) including the designer
How it helps: Designers get the feedback they need to refine their work. Never use a design review as a big reveal of project. Bring in experts from other teams.
How to go about it: Use a facilitator. The designer is not the best person to facilitate a conversation about her work. State the time limit for the design review. Introduce the designer and remind everyone that feedback should not turn into committee design. Feedback should be specific and candid. Point out what’s working well and what needs refinement. Frame the problem: give the designer an opportunity to frame the problem at the beginning of the review, including any user and business goals. For example, “Users want to save money more effectively, and we want to keep customers engaged by teaching them to manage their money better.” Identify the constraints of the project: ”Due to legal constraints, we have to disclose this information before the user can enroll in this new program.” The designer should state the goal of the design review: "I’m trying to determine if this photo upload workflow is intuitive.”
Design standups:
When they should happen? Daily, if possible
Who should be there? Everyone on the design team
How it helps: Your team gets the chance to sync up on projects. Short, daily check-ins that help your team stay abreast of the work being done.
How to go about it: In a standup, each team member answers 3 questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Are there any impediments in your way? consider doing them after lunch—the morning is when our minds are clearest and ready to focus on creative work. Don’t let standups turn into impromptu design critiques.
Retrospectives:
When they should happen: After a project is launched or a sprint is completed.
Who should be there: Everyone who worked on the project
How it helps: Your team will internalize lessons from each project. if you don’t pause to take stock, valuable lessons will slip by.
How to go about it: Send a pre-retrospective survey to the team before the meeting to capture each person’s perspective individually. Eliminate the bandwagon effect, which happens when the views of the group conform to those of a few vocal people. Ask your team to rate their performance both as a group and as individuals on a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is the highest. Ratings tend to cluster in a similar spot, but occasionally there are outliers. 3 questions: What worked well for us? What didn’t work well for us? What can we do to improve our process?
Postmortems:
When they should happen: After a project has gone poorly
Who should be there: Everyone who worked on the project and an impartial facilitator
How it helps: Your team will learn from their mistakes and find a way forward.
How to go about it: Before the meeting send an email asking the team to identify key points in the project timeline. This will be used to construct a master timeline of events. Choose a moderator. Ground rules: The moderator should first point out that this is not a blame session. Shortcomings of the team’s process, not the people involved. Facts: People recall events differently. The moderator can help the team agree upon what actually happened so lessons can be extracted.
Chapter 05 - Fast feedback
Design teams that build great products have a common trait—they habitually test their designs. Their only goal is- learn faster by spotting problems quickly and fixing them. A good prototype helps you get there. Good prototype is a balancing act—it feels like a real product, but doesn’t require a lot of time to build.
To choose prototyping tools; ask yourself these questions: Is it easy to focus on product design problems? Can I deploy my prototype to various devices? If you’re working remotely, is it easy to share the prototype and conduct remote testing?
Tools:
InVision and tool Sketch - a number of great learning resources to guide you if you’ve yet to make the leap to Sketch.
Craft by InVision provides a suite of free plugins for Sketch and Photoshop. Lets you pull real data from an API, fetch content from a site, or grab elegant photos and drop them into your design file to make your UI more realistic.
Keynote - Apple’s popular presentation software. Design prototypes in Keynote faster with Keynotopia’s UI templates for both iOS and Android.
UI kits - Use these free UI kits from InVision to make building a high-fidelity prototype fast and easy: NOW, Chat, Do, Relate, Tethr. Use a pattern library for faster prototyping. A pattern library is a collection of standard elements that can be combined like to create a new UI.
Getting feedback on your prototype:
Internal Testing: Walk around your office to grab a few colleagues for an impromptu prototype test.
Testing with customers: A very simple process to conducts tests with customers: a welcome, an ice-breaking period, the introduction of the prototype, the test, and a debrief. You can dive into the process in more detail in the book – Sprint from GV. "Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford." Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen Norman Group)
Recruiting customers for tests: If you have an existing customer base, query your database to find power users. Power users are often excited to see new design concepts and will give more informed feedback and influence the design process. GV team deploys a clever solution: Create a form to screen customers that asks a few questions. Create a worksheet to guide you to create a screener that will target the right kinds of people. Post a link to the screener form on Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook, and send it to an existing mailing list if available. Send a prototype to researchers to have it tested.
Testing remotely:Gregg Bernstein (Senior User Researcher for Vox Media) conducts tests with users remotely using inexpensive, freely available software. Gregg shares a Calendly link with the test participant, letting her select a convenient test time. Calendly also lets Gregg ask for permission to record the session, and lets him send details on what the test participant can expect. The Vox design team posts a prototype to InVision. Gregg invites the participant to an InVision LiveShare—a shared screen with voice chat where the customer can use the prototype while Gregg asks questions, observes, and takes notes. The session is recorded using ScreenFlow. After the test session is complete, Gregg re-watches the video to fill in gaps in his notes. He then shares those notes and his insights with his Product team via Slack. Lookback.io can also help you get fast feedback remotely. InVision and Lookback integrate to let you test a mobile app prototype with customers. Integrate Lookback into your app so test sessions can be triggered at any time.
More tips: After you’ve done the initial research and worked through many ideas on paper build the prototype. Don’t waste time prototyping the entire app. Focus instead on the parts about which you have the most questions. It should be real enough that customers won’t realize it’s just a prototype. Share it early and often. It’s always best to show the prototype on the target device if possible.
Chapter 06 - Lateral Design
In most companies there are two kinds of vertical relationships:
Design, at the top of the process, passes work down to engineering to execute.
Engineers build a product’s infrastructure and pass it to designers for decoration afterward.
The problem with this approach is: results are disjointed, as buttons and type might look nice, but workflows built around database models (instead of mental models) resulting in bad UX.
Build a cross-functional team:
Bring together engineers, designers, and a product manager to define a product’s purpose, function, and feel. Conceptualize solutions concurrently, not linearly. Keep your cross-functional teams small (no more than 10). The role of the Product Manager is to define the product roadmap and achieve the business’ goals. They keep the team on schedule and clear any barriers to progress.
Unite engineering, product management, and design (EPD). EPD as a 3-legged stool - in which each leg represents one of the three areas. Each function is involved and aligned from product/features' inception to its launch. Few examples: Facebook organizes its teams by product features like news feed, profile, or messenger. Airbnb organizes teams around areas of the user experience like the guest or host experience.
Benefits:
Fosters empathy and respect that make collaboration easier (and more fun).
Communication is much faster; designers are immediately made aware of the technical challenges their decisions create, and engineers learn when function diminishes form.
Diverse perspectives - lead to better product solutions.
Shared ownership dampens political fighting.
Challenges:
Workgroups, because they’re temporary, rarely surface significant issues.
Designers working in a different group will wrestle with their identity and struggle to adapt. Designers need regular feedback from other designers. In a cross-functional team, it’s common for a designer to operate alone.
Solutions:
Paired design (Slack): Pair designers to help them explore ideas more. Pair a designer with a colleague from another team who can spend about 8 hours per week.
Design reviews (Twitter): In order to prevent designers from feeling isolated or unable to consistently learn from their colleagues, schedule weekly design reviews and other activities in the design studio to bring everyone together as a team.
Rotate teams (BBC): lets employees work on a new team every year.
For decentralized design teams: To make sure design remains consistent across features and products build a design system and articulate your design values to the whole team. Example: Spotify GLUE.
Chapter 07 - Break the black box
Design—once transparent, and integrated into the product process can be easily ignored or misunderstood. As a company grows, communication becomes key to good design.
What can be done?
Create social capital by developing a rapport with colleagues across the organization. Grab lunch with a developer who may build out your next design. Spend time with researchers, salespeople who hear frequent requests, PMs, and customer service agents.
Set the stage for unsolicited feedback by printing screens and posting them in a space where passersby can catch a glimpse. Leave post-it notes and pens nearby and see what happens. When the design is accessible to all, the process feels inclusive.
"Your legs are your most effective design tool. Get out and connect with people.” Mark Opland – Facebook
Tips:
Share early and often. Set design review days on your team’s calendar and invite anyone to participate.
Network and build social capital. Your org chart is not a list of names; it’s a group of potential allies. Get to know them.
Be open and accessible. Post your work in a public space. Present your work at company coffee hours. Talk about your work and answer questions in a company Slack channel.
