On learning from failure

Our top 3 design mistakes

Design mistakes. They happen to the best of us. We know we all make design mistakes, and yet surprisingly few designers take the time to reflect on what went wrong and how they’d like to do things better next time. Even though we have many rituals in our toolkit, in practice the pace of our work doesn’t always allow us to stop and think about what went wrong, or what lessons can be drawn from that.

2021 was a year of immense growth, and we are seeing those dynamics carry over into 2022. As part of these changes, we’re reflecting as an experience design team on the top 3 design mistakes we’ve made so far. We’re also reflecting on what our learnings are from them. Because as Bram Stoker said, “We learn from failure, not from success.”

Designing everything from scratch

Making investment transactions is a core product flow. When people make a transaction (e.g. sell some crypto, or buy stock in a company), they see a detailed view of that transaction during the flow.

Or, should we say, views.

As we were designing the mobile and desktop views, all kinds of cases kept appearing. Because we didn’t have formal processes in place, a lead developer had to carry requirements between developers and designers. It doesn’t help that we had neither a design system nor a proper description for how this screen should look.

If scaling is in your organisation’s cards (as it is for us — we’re hiring on a hybrid work model for multiple roles across Europe), this creates problems down the line. Working on a case-by-case basis isn’t scalable. In the words of the designer who designed these screens, “It was a buttload of work,” and while scaling could also be described as a “buttload of work,” it’s different in nature to that of designing case-by-case.

And the challenges spill over onto other teams later down the production line. Imagine your QA engineering team members. Now imagine their faces when you ask them to maintain test cases for 30 or 40 cases.

While it’s not rocket science, we learned we have to use a design pattern and have a well-written ticket that accompanies it. We also learned that we need a design system for a platform as large as ours. Lastly, we learned that when we stop designing from scratch, we win time to understand the problems we’re designing for and the business objectives we’re striving to meet.

Even if you’re at a start-up or small-scale operation, resist the urge to work without design patterns and systems. Putting in the effort up front saves you exponentially on resources and energy later on.

Launching MVPs that aren’t also lovable

When we started out in 2014, we were young upstarts focused on the cryptocurrency space. We allowed ourselves to take design shortcuts in order to achieve a time to market of “right now.” But as we hypergrow, we’re shifting from MVPs (minimum viable product) ad infinitum to offering minimum lovable products (MLP). Loved by whom, you ask? Loved by investors on our platform!

Think back to all those views in the investment transaction screens. If we had to look at the 30–40 cases with an MLP lens, we would have noticed that we spent more time in the solution space than we did in the problem space. We may have been able to reduce the number of scenarios, being more efficient with our time and our teammates’ time too.

But ultimately, we’ve realised that focusing on MVPs that aren’t also MLPs doesn’t set us up to offer them an elevated investing experience. As Raquel Damas, the Head of Experience Design put it:

“Highly engaging products are products people love. They love how they feel when using them: seen, understood, empowered. Creating a product that people adopt and deeply engage with — making it part of their everyday lives — goes way beyond making sure that an interface is usable, accessible and friendly.”

How do you know when it’s love or a mere crush, you ask? Try asking yourself the following questions:

• Do you understand the problem you’re solving for, or not?
• Do customers love your product, or tolerate it?
• Do you think your customers know what they want, or not?
• Are you dedicating effort to an opportunity, or keeping effort lean because you think success is unlikely?

If the first part of these questions feels more right, then it’s love, baby!

Switching from a mentality of “competing against our competitors” to “paving our own way” frees us from churning out features our customers don’t love just because a competitor offers them. Instead, we can prioritise improving their experience and re-orient our sights towards other goals, like a MLP.

Playing the “screen-deliverer” role

Part of the MVP-to-MLP shift involved a re-branding of our team from the UX/UI Team to the Experience Design (XD) Team. “What we tell ourselves we do changes how we see what we are responsible for,” explains Damas. “If we want to shift how we work and shape our product to be better both today and tomorrow, then we have to shift how we approach our work too.”

Experience design considers how people interact with a product holistically, at every touch point, including brand, content, product and service. It considers how and when people identify with an experience, and how and when they don’t. Calling ourselves the UI/UX team implied that we saw design as giving form to backend limitations or possibilities. By changing our name to the XD team, we’re set up to see design as having a conversation with our customers that’s offered through a product or service.

Like any conversation, if it gets boring, people lose their interest. Switching our name from UX/UI to XD helps us — and our colleagues — keep the holistic vision of design in sight.

Learn, stretch, repeat

We’ve learned that the “start-up to scale-up to corporate” process is a series of growing pains, not a linear progression.

Since mid-2021, we’ve been retooling and renewing our design approach by taking all of these learnings — and countless others — into account.

With new design talent coming on board, we’re stretching ourselves in good ways to design a better experience for millions of newcomers and veterans to the investment space. How are we doing that? We’re starting by understanding who they are and what they care about in their lives.

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Ready to invest in you? We’re hiring designers across Europe to join us. Our incredible HQ is based in Vienna and we have Talent Hubs spread across multiple European cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bucharest, Dublin, Krakow, London, Madrid and Milan. Our hybrid work model means you can enjoy the benefits of working from home and socialising with team members.

Credits: Elif Alp-Marent, UX Writer