Building Our Design Principles & Values
At Vend, we have the opportunity to create change right at the heart of one of the biggest industries in the world: retail.
The products that we design and build change the lives of many retailers: from the mom-and-pop shops that were built from the ground up with sweat and tears, to multi-mega chains who employ hundreds of people and create jobs for our brothers and sisters.
In our design team, we know that every decision we make has the butterfly effect of influencing how a cashier is starting their day, or how a manager is following up with orders, across the globe. Being in a Saas company, however, we often have to work with time and resource constrains, ship quick one-off solutions (weep!), juggle technical and UX debt, and more.
How do we innovate and stay 10 steps ahead of the game, while managing all this chaos?
As individual designers, the work we create is guided by our own set of beliefs and qualities.
In a team, however, we need a strategic way to align the brilliant and diverse minds we have, to move as one.
Together, we have created a set of Design Principles and Values that can be shared by designers and non-designers. It presents our point of view and approach, and provides a clear sense of prioritisation that can help us resolve disputes around design decisions.
Before getting down to that, we started with the most important question:
What are we all here for?
That was a simple yet extremely difficult question to answer! It was two steps away from asking, what is the meaning of life?
It took a lot of thinking, reflection, and guts from the team to finally pull out the honest truth:
To make things we’re proud of.
That one line, till today, still teases a teardrop out from my inner designer-child. Being a global tech company, we work on a very fast-paced, highly-competitive, eat-or-be-eaten commercial stage. And in our design team, all of the work we do is put through a significant amount of research, rational debate, vigorous testing, and flexing to deal with compromises.
At the heart of it all, the absolute desire to do good work is what makes us a great team.
So what makes good design in Vend?
With all that energy, we put our heads together during a design offsite at Waiheke and came up with a set of guiding principles to capture how we design for a bold, diverse, wonderful world of retail. In order of importance:
#1 BE CLEAR
Clarity: “But think of Jo!”
Jo is a 60 year old lady using Vend in a boutique homeware store in Newmarket (for reals, Nicola Horlor our Product Designer used to work with her!) Jo loves Vend as it’s simple; she’s learned it and has been using it for a while. But Jo would be terrified of any new change to the UI, avoids clicking on cryptic buttons, and would get intimidated by complicated tasks or flows.
Jo’s a reminder for us to keep it sweet and simple, and not to make assumptions about all our users.
#2 BE TRUE
Consistency: Be consistent till it no longer makes sense to.
Everything we design has one voice: Vend’s. We utilise brand guidelines and product toolkits to the max, wherever we can, until we reach the outer bounds of what they can do for us. When the rules of the bounds stop working for us, we don’t make exceptions; we go back to the rules and ensure they make sense.
Such is our dedication to our design guides and system.
#3 BE FRIENDLY
Empathy: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
Although we build with the greatest and latest technologies, behind the digital screens, we are just humans designing for other humans. We care for each other, we help our users do amazing things… but we also make mistakes, we apologise, and we learn and grow. That’s how we know, our product will always be a better version of what it used to be.
We want that authenticity and humility to be reflected in our work. The opposite of that would be saying: “They could just use Excel.” :puke-emoji:
#4 BE BOLD
Future Thinking: Design for the next 100,000
Be long-sighted, not short-sighted. Don’t be held back for the current few users who moan and complain about every single change. Make it great for a specific kind of customer, not average for all the possible customers. Make the right decision for our niche.
How do we collaborate as a team?
Our principles create a system to help us make more unanimous decisions, faster, as we design better products. Meanwhile, we also have a series of values that capture how we do that as a team.
Yes, and…
Productive conflict fuels creativity and good design. The intent here isn’t to have a winner and loser, but to bring in different perspectives, add to the conversation, and work through an idea to ensure it is well understood by everyone on the team. Although we may reject some ideas through this process, we will however arrive at new ones that better inform the design.
Words before pixels
Design is all about communication. Before getting groovy with design, start by asking questions, articulating your ideas, solving problems and laying out the solution with words. Creativity can be expressed with your opinions, ideas, via wordplay, and more.
Design is never final
Don’t be precious about your work. Question things that we have just shipped, or that have always existed. Whether a design is valid or not, has nothing to do with how recently that work was done.
Make it the best you can
Don’t settle for okay, but know that it’s better to help retailers than be in the constant pursuit of perfection.
The Design Team
I’m Jade Tan SP, Senior Product Designer in Vend. We’ve got a Product Design team in the company, currently also made up of Ludwig Wendzich, Director of UX, and Nicola Horlor, Junior Product Designer. The three of us have formed the powerhouse of design for the product-engineering team by creating unified design systems and libraries that are highly scalable and workable.
We’ve also got a Marketing Design team, who take care of the corporate site and every other touchpoint that our potential users take leading up to a trial with Vend. For them, conversion is king! Spearheading the charge is Michael Ramirez, Lead Designer, Scott True and Yuan Hooi, Ng, both Senior Designers.
These values and principles have since become the DNA of our design teams. They’ve helped us find direction and clarity through countless debates, and have also cemented our critical position as designers in the company’s ever-changing landscape.
If you want to be part of our growing, dynamic team of designers in Vend, we’re hiring!
