Recently I have the honour to share my experience working as a product designer with the SMU students online over the Zoom call with my product manager. As far as I can remember, this was my first time sharing with an audience, so I was pretty stoked and nervous at the same time.
It was a short 30 minutes Q&A session with three questions submitted by the students before the sharing session, and my product manager and I took turn to answer those three questions from the product management and design point of view respectively. In this post, I will share my thoughts to the three questions.
Question 1
What are some common pitfalls to avoid when implementing a product design/digital solution in the business environment and how have successful companies navigated these challenges?
There are three common pitfalls that I would like to share. The first one is to design based on HiPPO or Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Essentially what this means is we design a product feature based on what our superior’s or CEO’s personal opinion. This is a common pitfall in a company that are not user-centric or has low UX maturity. We shouldn’t be blindly following opinions of our bosses, but be open minded and test any assumptions with user interviews and testings, even if is coming from your very boss.
The second pitfall is thinking that “design is easy”. We shouldn’t go straight into hi-fidelity design without any research done to validate our assumptions, and to guide us to design the right thing. This can be avoided by implementing a design process, for example the famous Double Diamond Design Process or the Design Odyssey framework.
Lastly the third pitfall is not constantly tracking the performance or success metrics of the feature when launched to public. You can use analytic tool to get quantitative datas on how the app is being used, and then conduct user interviews for more in-depth insights. These datas will guide us to identify what wasn’t desirable that can be improved.
Question 2
How do industry leaders approach user-centric design and UX when developing these digital solutions, and what strategies have proven most effective in ensuring a positive user experience?
In order to foster a user-centric organisation, research plays a huge part. Before designing, we need to understand very well who are we designing this for, what are their needs and pain points. Research activities should also involve stakeholders in other departments, get them listening in the interview sessions, or participate in ideation workshops. Involving colleagues in part of the design process will surely increase the awareness in importance of user-centric design approach.
Besides that, research findings should be circulated and documented. I find research findings presented in a deck is an ideal way to get it shared and circulated. Besides that you may consider using tools like Notion, Confluence or Dovetail to store your researches online that can be easily accessed by anyone for reference. One strategy shared recently by a McKinsey Research Director that I worked with is that the research team may consider doing recurring email newsletter to share research insights to company wide. With this, the people in the company can subscribe and read, and thus building this great culture of user-centric design approach.
Another strategy I want to share is by having design principles. Design principles are a good tool to help guiding designers when comes to designing consistent experience, but also as a good tool to use to solve debates. When we are unsure about a certain design decisions or feedback from stakeholders, we can use the design principles to make decision making or effective and user-centric. Check out design principles from Spotify, Atlassian or Principles.Design that aggregates many design principles in one place for inspiration. [https://principles.design/](https://principles.design/)
Question 3
What steps can organisations take to ensure that their product design and digital solution efforts are scalable and can effectively meet the demands of their growing customer base?
To make design scalable, designers should design with a design system from the start. It might be daunting as in early stage, designers are more focused on creating the product. But with a design system, even if is just a small one with a few basic components and style guides, it will set a good foundation for designers to create consistent experience faster.
Secondly is try not to reinvent the wheel. Designers should use common design patterns for more predictable experiences for the users, and then spend more time on crafting the specific experiences that are truly unique for your company. For example, for a ride hailing app, use common pattern for login flow, but design unique experience on book a ride journey.
Lastly, is to ship small. When designing a product feature, you should have a long term vision on how this product can be, however you should have milestones in between now and the end goal, and start shipping from a minimum viable/lovable product. This MVP/MLP usually contains only the bare minimum feature which is enough for users to use and get benefitted from. With this you can ship quicker, and also be able to pivot and tweak for the better faster.
Final thought
While I have made some tweaks to what I actually said during the Zoom call, the answers above carried most of the nuances. I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with people and aspiring designers. Here I would like to thank my company for such opportunity and I hope to do more in the future.
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