UX-strategy in practice. Part 2 - Grocery Designer

In the first part of the article about the UX-strategy, I spoke about a mature approach to design in the modern world. And he proposed three levels of its development. Each of these levels has its own challenges, problems, tasks, and limitations. And this set is changing as the organization becomes more mature. We need strong UX-leaders with a clear vision of changes and inner strength for their implementation, so that the design culture of the company grows and does not break into the many constraints of the real world. But without a strong and intelligent design team, nothing will come of it - one leader is not enough.

• Operational - designer as the ultimate performer. Provides tasks for creating design artifacts.
• Tactical - designer as part of the product team. Closely integrates design work with other product tasks.
• Strategic - designer as a visionary and product manager. Influences strategic product development decisions.

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Who is needed for such a team? In recent years, the rather broad term “product designer” has been established, which characterizes such a specialist well. I will try to describe our experience in developing such people. As well as a general understanding of where the industry is heading.

Article written for the magazine UXMatters .

The need for speed

Most of the complex design tasks are at the intersection of roles and specialties. It is not enough to draw a spectacular page of an article in a magazine style without adjusting the editorial process and CMS - you will not get the content for this design. It is impossible to make the design of a service modern if its advertising grid is bad, and existing arrangements with advertisers do not change it. And if the product represents the conflicting interests of several units at once, you cannot make any major changes without agreements with them.

There are at least medium-scale situations in the company. And as the organization grows, their number and complexity grows at each point. This means that the designer and the UX-researcher cannot remain in their cozy little world and be engaged only in the visual part. And any other specialist too. He must understand what is happening in related areas and, if necessary, interfere with related processes and influence their change. This is the current reality of more or less mature product companies.

It is obvious that such problems have always existed and this did not prevent technologies from developing. But the speed of launching new products on the market and their development is growing. Also, as their total number - almost in every market niche is not overcrowded, so grocery teams have to keep pace.

In addition to speed, the volume of knowledge that a modern specialist should possess is growing. In addition to this, the essence of the work becomes complicated - the technological, interface and business aspects become more and more, we solve more and more high-level tasks and problems every year. Previously, it was enough to go through the list of ten recommendations of Jacob Nielsen and the level of design of your product noticeably detached from competitors. Now, the basic level of “interface hygiene” has acquired almost everything and we need to do more subtle work - involving the user, building cross-channel interaction, designing the entire service delivery chain, and complex behavioral analytics.

The amount of required knowledge has always led to a strong specialization of the members of the product team - only this way all the necessary competencies can be obtained at a sufficiently deep level. But the demands of the market for speed are much more important - in an ultra-bouncy competitive environment, you need to deliver a product as quickly as possible and spend as little resources as possible on it. And to ensure this speed, the team must be brisk and harmonious, which is easiest to achieve with its compactness.

In order to make the team more dynamic, you need to get rid of unnecessary highly specialized roles. Those. remove extra chain links from the product idea to the implementation. There is always some overlap between them - a dedicated designer, product manager or designer can design an interface; to prepare the layout - a specialized coder, an intelligent designer or developer. If we choose the option with a dedicated specialist, the quality of this work will be higher. But the problems are full:

• Communication gets complicated and details get lost. At all meetings and discussions, there are more people present so that they are aware of what is happening and everyone is sure that they are equally aware of what they are doing within the framework of a common vision.
• The production chain is extended. More stages of work, more time spent in the amount.
• Blurred product liability. Each makes a small piece of isolated, and then - the care of the next chain.

In short, this approach has high transaction costs. For design studios and other outsourcers, predictability is more important - they sell the customer a guaranteed result that can be achieved with strong formalization. But for a grocery company, speed is critical, so the process is built around it. But small startups still cannot afford to hire too many people. I wrote about this at the beginning of the year . Therefore, in many situations it is reasonable to combine several roles in one specialist at once.

Requirements for a modern designer

Who is needed in this new world? I will try to make out the versatile qualities and responsibilities of the product designer.

Product Responsibility

It is important to reduce the transaction costs of the production process - the constant transition of project artifacts back and forth. They eat up a lot of time and energy, forcing them to engage in routine rather than interesting work. We need to forget about the conveyor approach and move to a dynamic interaction. To do this, each of the members of the product team must be responsible for him and for the part that he brings into it. This is possible only in a relatively compact team - otherwise the authority will overlap.

As a result, the main skill of the product designer is not so much the ability to work in a graphic editor, to understand the code or analyze research data. The main skill is the desire and ability to take responsibility for the product. And what exactly you can help this or that product team is already a question of its specificity. And in order to fit well into it, to get the powers you need within its framework, you need to be flexible in terms of knowledge and not sour in one area.

A grocery designer does not live stamps, mantras and professional templates. The structure of the site may correspond to the best practices, but does not fit into the actual patterns of use of the product. Common sense is a good guideline, but users often behave illogically, so that a solution that is convenient for a specific audience may contradict generally accepted design logic. Ideal elaboration of a function with unusual approaches to interaction may be unnecessary if it is used by a small percentage of users, and even occasionally.

The modern designer does not call the developers lazy ghouls, sales - short-minded merchants, and managers - narrow-minded autocrats. He understands their pain and tasks, combines several sources of requirements at once, draws conclusions and makes design decisions soberly and with an understanding of limitations. And it certainly has eggs to defend difficult design decisions. You do senseless work not when developers and managers change your design against your will, but when you don’t even try to influence it.

Times change

Modern digital products come in many ways from technology. When the web appeared, the developers themselves arranged the elements on the page and gave them some style - someone had to do it.

Amazon and Yahoo !, 1995

One of the main design theorists and UX Donald Norman says that innovative breakthroughs occur primarily due to technology . And only then the design helps to adapt them for comfortable use.

Over time, as in other professions, a long and interesting way began to specialize and highlight roles - including connecting designers and researchers. And the composition of the project team, which included or involved such a specialist, became mandatory. But as the complexity of products and technological development grew, so did the design specialization. About 7-10 years ago, companies needed a specialist who would be able to communicate with users, design the interface, work out its visual design, including the accompanying graphics like icons, and even participate in its layout. Over time, everyone realized that it was almost impossible to find a strong person in all these areas and began to hire a researcher, designer, designer and layout designer separately.

Yahoo !, one of the best designs of 2013 according to Apple

But now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction again - grocery companies need a complete designer. It will be very good in one of the key design competencies and good enough to close the rest. And gradually pump them to become more and more useful. At most stages of the workflow, this will be enough, and if not, you can always involve an expert in research, interfaces, visual or layout that will help to move forward. In this case, at the level of a small company, it is quite normal to have one all-rounder. And as you grow, make a reasonable specialization around a group of skills - user research, interface design, visual design, front-end activity. The level of complexity of modern products is not weak, and just here concretizing consoles appear.

Last year, another interface classic, Jared Spool, launched the initiative to create the UX Unicorn Institute on Kickstarter . He just has to educate multi-faceted designers in demand in the grocery environment.

The word "design", unfortunately, is sometimes limited to the meaning of "design." Product design leads her to the original meaning - it is an expert in determining what the product will be. Be it a researcher, designer, analyst, designer, or even an engineer who defines the system architecture. Disputes about who is more important in this regard are rather meaningless. You either take responsibility for the product and solve the design of its problems and business problems. Either remain the page painter in Photoshop or the gray rectangles in Axure. You do not wait until you are asked - you propose changes yourself, recommend solutions, initiate processes.

Have my own problems

Of course, in such an active approach there are a lot of restrictions and you will have to face them - the design itself will take less time, you will have to make compromises. And if you approach the launch responsibly - a considerable amount of time passes from design to release. It will be difficult and from an emotional point of view. Taking responsibility for your design decisions and actively defending them, you are strongly attached to them. And it can be very sad and bitter if, as a result of disputes with managers and developers, you still have to redo them.

On the other hand, Christina Wodtke correctly notes that if a product fails , you risk mostly getting a negative experience. While the product manager may be completely dismissed.

But if you learn to work with this - you can move mountains. Although it is important to understand the business and start talking to him in the same language. Why does the company take certain decisions, why are some more important for it than others, what challenges does the business face, which directions will take the lead, and which ones will be a bad thing?

Knowing this, you will be able to build your relationships in such a way as to be heard and understood. And to have authority for a much larger range of actions than simply defining the nuances of interaction and visual style. It is important to solve business problems - then you will be on the same wavelength with it and will be able to implement such profound changes with your design that you never dreamed of. By the way, it will also become easier to assert concrete design decisions - I wrote about all this in the first part of the article.

Our experience

Product designers began to actively be called two or three years ago . We in Mail.Ru Group came to about the same conclusions. Five years ago, the attitude towards design in the company became serious and changes began. Spinning the flywheel — updating products, changing processes, assembling and working a team, changing values ​​and worldview — takes some time for a company of this magnitude.

In the course of hiring a team and its integration into the process of grocery work, it became clear that people who are able to take responsibility for themselves and act as authority in their profession, given the objective reality (managers tend to influence the design, do not give enough time, there are intersections of several projects in work schedule, etc.) - not so much. Many people know how to talk beautifully, draw well, offer interesting visual and interactive concepts. But to act as a leader who will bring his decision to implementation despite the external environment - few are capable of that. The environment is generally very demanding in most successful technology companies.

Why it happens? There are not so many food companies in Russia, so the main source of specialists is agencies. And this is a completely different reality, in which it is rarely the responsibility to ensure that design decisions show themselves well at a distance. And only a part of designers communicates with the client directly, without managers. Not to mention access to users. The boom of startups that just have to increase the number of product designers has started relatively recently. But so far there are not so many successful stories among them, and this is the main criterion for accumulating the necessary experience. In the United States and Europe, the market is more mature in all respects, but even here the explosion of a systematic approach to design on a massive scale has been occurring since relatively recently.

But if the right specialists cannot be hired, they can be taught. The main thing here is the base - good design skills and the desire to grow professionally. There are three main aspects of professionalism:

1. Relevance to the case . General approach to work on the product and participation in the product team. Landmark - increased involvement and responsibility.
2. Skills . General and narrow professional skills. Requirements for their width and depth are constantly growing, you need to match the time.
3. Toolkit . Possession of them is an opportunity to survive in the conditions of growing professional requirements. Landmark - automation of their work.

I will describe in detail each of the three components.

Attitude

There are several important rules for organizing the workflow, due to which there is an increase in engagement and general professionalism:

Product Responsibility

I already wrote about this above, but I will duplicate it more than once - this is the key moment for the product designer. Paraphrasing the famous words of Steve Ballmer: responsibility, responsibility, responsibility!

Active participation

In discussions, the process of implementation and the future life of the product - a reaction to the criticism of users, the study of how it works in practice. Moreover, the designer should not just be an outside observer, taking notes on the decisions made by others - he should have his own opinion, defend or correct it. It is important not only to draw the design, but also to bring it to life.

Julie Zhuo says that leadership begins with responsibility for the problem , the ability of the designer to bring her decision to the desired result. Active participation allows you to bring up local leaders.

A close bunch of designer with a product manager

The densest of all within the team - they together determine what the product will be. In the early stages, the product manager cannot give exact specifications - how and what exactly needs to be done. It has only general incomplete requirements, a hypothesis that needs to be worked out and jointly turned into final product solutions. And this requires many iterations, trial and error. If this communication goes through a task tracker, and not personal interaction, the transaction costs are going through the roof, turning everything into a worthless ping-pong.

So this approach is effective - thanks to constant interaction and communication, the vicious practice “I have been given the task, I have drawn” is minimized. In addition, the product manager is often overwhelmed with a bunch of administrative and other non-product-related work, so help is helpful. It is important to show empathy not only to users, but also to teammates - the manager often receives from all sides.

Jeff Lash compares the role of the product manager with the president . He also has advisors on various aspects (design, back-end, front-end, marketing, etc.), who with the help of answers to private questions “how the product should work” in a certain aspect help to solve the main task - “what and for whom the product should be made. ” The interface is what the end user works with and what he often understands as a product (this is typical for consumer services, and more recently for intracorporate systems). A good designer and researcher knows a lot about users and the manager needs this knowledge for a successful launch.

Jeff Lash has another great presentation showing overlapping product manager and interface specialists:

Transition to the command model, pair work

Several designers work on the same task from different sides, communicate tightly and thus look at it from different points of view, twice as attentively, with different skills. Moreover, such pairs are formed situationally, based on the task and the set of skills necessary to solve it. In today's world, it is becoming more and more difficult to have highly specialized employees in all areas. Just like you never guess what combination of skills you need tomorrow. Such situational working groups just allow you to get a rare combination of skills due to the close work of several designers. This enriches not only the product, but also the team itself - the skills are tightened at all.

In situational workgroups there are no hierarchical models and subordination. Rather, there are unofficial leaders in directions instead of bosses - one is strong in promotional design, the second is better at coordinating guidelines, the third is the master of Android. And in every situation they turn to him for advice.

An interesting point with this approach is that it is difficult to single out who exactly the author of a particular design is, since the collaboration was so close. But there is always a responsible person - who exactly collected all the ideas, suggestions, analytics and developments together, formed the final decision based on them and brought it to mind. Therefore, the meaning of authorship design in grocery companies is different.

Pair work is important for other professionals - a bunch of designer with a UX-researcher, front-end developer, etc. It is important to reduce the transaction costs of the conveyor process - a constant design transition back and forth. It is they who eat up a lot of time and energy, forcing them to engage in routine instead of interesting work.

Getting rid of artifacts

Specifications, prototypes, design layouts, and other design artifacts are a way to convey an understanding of what a product should be. And this also means transaction costs. The best product specification is a working product. And it is better to spend time polishing the product itself than on aesthetic accompanying documents. Therefore, the product designer seeks to minimize the creation of side artifacts.

If you can not draw a layout, and with the developer pick the code - it will save time and effort, and the changes will fall into the product faster. Transmitting ideas on a secondary screen in the form of a sketch or a quick sketch in digital form is much easier than licking its layout in detail. Artifacts very quickly become obsolete and it takes a lot of time and effort to keep them up to date. Do you want to be an archivist or is it better to solve more interesting problems? Do not build your career around a tool or documentation format like wireframes, go farther and wider.

System thinking

It is important not only to process incoming requests, but to understand why and why they come, who forms them and how they can be influenced. And even better - think about what needs to be done in a week, month, year. Not to draw more and more new patterns every time, but to systematize the developments and reuse them - for the comfort of users, the speed of development and the reduction of manual work for oneself. Try to automate part of the work.

You should not try to solve all the problems with one jerk - in a complex product it will be too big and smeared. It is better to build a continuous process of implementing changes and improvements. First, it is important to make hell adequate. From adekvat - to make something modern and trend. And after that you can already think about how to set trends yourself. You can jump through the steps, but at a distance systematic beats heroism. Especially paired with hard work and perseverance.

Professional erudition

We are also expected to have a certain level of professional erudition, deep knowledge of their subject area - what is in demand now will be relevant in the near future, and even better - and how we historically came to modern interfaces. And this whole level of knowledge, it would seem, is not so easy to recruit, but maintaining and developing looks even more expensive.

New platforms are constantly being added, for which we are creating interfaces - we need to understand both the features of each of them and the alignment of user interaction with several devices at once. Well, the depth of knowledge on the main subject area is growing continuously - products and solutions become more complex and multifactorial. You need to spend enough time reading books and articles, participating in professional communities, studying and collecting patterns, writing your own publications and presentations. This is the only way to keep up with the speed of changes in the industry and increase the overall level of competence.

What gives such an attitude to knowledge?

1. Quick and in-depth research on new market niches when a working need comes. You already have a ready-made collection of patterns, studies, successes and failures - this gives an excellent edge.
2. Quick response to market changes . Watch Android Wear and Apple Watch only showed, and you have been watching competitors for a couple of years and know how to build interaction with such devices. The same applies to more pragmatic things - the new version of Android, approaches to solving interface problems in specific market niches.
3. Increased credibility within the company and in the industry as a whole . You can answer many questions much earlier and deeper than others. So, it is more often claimed by colleagues who trust you as a professional.

All this makes you a stronger specialist and more valuable employee. So time investment pays off professional and career growth. Erudition, of course, does not negate the need to produce a practical result - a walking encyclopedia with a mediocre exhaust is very few people need. But in conjunction hand and deep knowledge give an explosive result.

Ability to negotiate

A grocery designer does not stand in a pose and doesn’t say “only this way or that”. It balances between the limitations of time, technology, priorities, current resources. He seeks to do his job perfectly, but is willing to compromise if, for example, it is important to release a product as early as possible, even despite some problems in the current implementation of the design. In this case, insist on the fact that the modifications were made immediately after launch. The balance between the interests of the business and the user is important - in the real world you will never be able to keep them at 100%.

The first impression after the release is important, but this is only the beginning of a long journey, during which the product will often be refined and improved. Perfectionism is good quality if it does not dominate common sense. Many young designers are ready to go crazy for the sake of achieving a certain ideal state of the product to launch. Although it is at this moment that a lot of real-life data comes in that lead to numerous changes regarding this ideal image! Cameron Tonkinwise nicely describes this problem .

Integration

And, most importantly, the product designer is integrated into the team. Together with her she solves problems, but does not work as a freelance artist who does tasks on request and tries to distance herself from the process. Only in a tight bundle and communication on a personal level, you can get away from the problems of the pipeline. As Khoi Vinh says, the most critical time for a designer to participate in a grocery job is all the time . Although the most important period is on the eve of launch, when the main part of the implementation problems comes out and the first data on the actual use of the product appears. So initial interface solutions change a lot and often.

The modern concept of lean UX perfectly solves all these problems. Another thing is that large companies are not so easy to apply it in its pure form. Although the desire for absolute purity of methods is often more religious, not practical. But this is another great example of the modern format of the designer's work - you need to focus on him.

One of the interesting formats for lean UX is the product designer acting as its own agency. In different contexts of the product’s life, the team addresses it with its own problems, and it decides on the situation what it is best to help right now. It is necessary to abandon the rigidly defined processes, collect them along the way. The nForm company describes quite well the variant of such an approach .

Work on the product, not at work

The product you are working on is used by thousands and millions of people. It is incredibly pleasant when you are thanked for it - and just on the Internet, and maybe personally, friends and acquaintances. And even better, if all this is also commercially successful - a dead company does not benefit anyone. This is much cooler likes on Behance and Dribbble. So the main focus and attention is better paid to solving the problems of users and businesses, and the portfolio will add itself to the completed product. Tools and artifacts, methods and practices, workflow - all are just ways to solve these problems. It is important to know about all the updates in the industry and be ready to apply them, but not to put them at the forefront.

Skills

I described the requirements for a modern designer quite widely. But what exactly should he be able to do? I'll try to make out the whole set of skills that are potentially useful in the product team. I will not talk about specific methods - rather about key tasks:

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Teehan+Lax , Meng To Xcode , Facebook Origami , Resonator . AprilZero Anand Sharmashow that everything is possible - the designer went through the entire cycle from thinking through, designing and visual design to implementing and launching a personal information service! A lot of designers write their own scripts and plug-ins, and many go further and make their own tools - 2014 was the year of their insane boom. The success of Sketch, which moved the monstrous Photoshop from the awesome scale of Adobe, inspired many.

Total

In order for the UX-strategy to work, we need to work systematically at all levels - from a common vision to the values ​​of a specific participant in the product team. Therefore, in my series of publications I will go through all the key aspects of the design process. I wanted to start with the designer in a broad sense, including the researcher and others influencing the final interface. It is this fighter that helps the product happen and is the basis of everything.

Modern design is not just trends - flat, animation orchestration, smart watches, etc. Or mastery of the latest tools and best practices. This is a modern understanding of the role of design in the world. We know a lot about how the user works with the product and this knowledge makes us extremely valuable for managers and customers. And the design thinking applied to organizational processes allows one to go beyond the interface screens and influence how the company works as a whole.

Together with specific skills, they give significantly more exhaust. So it's time to actively develop in a broad sense, not limited to a narrow niche of the main skills. And then, you see, other career development stages will open - the management of the design team, product management, the company's founding designer (Airbnb, Mailbox, Tumblr and others) or even the CEO of a large corporation (as happened with Lexus and Kia). This is possible if you learn to take responsibility and the associated risks. Only then do you cease to be the engine of pixels or gray squares and begin to solve real problems of business and users.