A round-up of Design It, Build It Conference 2016

We live in a world where the expectations for products to work and work well is the norm. We’re not content waiting an extra couple of seconds for a page to load or happy to restart our entire process when something goes wrong. Users have high demands and its our job as product people to help make their experience as simple as possible.

This sense of purpose for designers was very much echoed in the ‘Design It, Build It’ conference that ran this week in Edinburgh. Split over 2 days, we heard from legends such as Cap from Buzzfeed and Scott Hurff from Tinder. We also saw some of Edinburgh’s leading companies, FanDuel and Whitespace, and not to mention our very own Colin McFarland from Skyscanner talk about their experiences and challenges in meeting high user demand.

Embedding Design

Cap kicked us off with a talk about life at Buzzfeed and his journey to VP of Design. Like a lot of us, he didn’t study traditional design, instead taught himself and learnt on the job. His advice was to find a mentor to learn from “You know the smartest person in the room… Stick to them like glue and keep bothering them”. Cap also advised to find someone in another company to chat with regularly about challenges and what your working on, advocating it was a good way to avoid falling into the daily grind chat.

Cap talked a lot about how to get design valued in an organisation. TL;DR… Its hard. Its frustrating. Its not magic. You will experience failure. His advice was to define an ideal state and be thoughtful of others. Pretend you’re already there, especially with new hires. The more people who think its the norm, the more it will become the norm. He also advised to acknowledge and empathise with people in order to help bring people along. He’s found that by getting people to help each other makes building trust that much easier.

When Cap first started at Buzzfeed, there was a few key things to get in order… a competency framework for design, grades and job titles. He talked about how he used a similar methodology to extend this to Engineering and Product and now sees his role is as much about designing an organisation as it is about designing products.

Something that really resonated with me was Cap’s advice to “Let it go, you will fail”. We often get caught up on everything and want it all to be fixed right away that we often miss the progress we’ve made.

Cap also gave an example of when he and a colleague were in the habit of debating every last detail until one day his colleague said he was a “only a 2 out of 10” whereas Cap said he was a “6 out of 10”. So in this situation they went with Cap’s. This has proved a useful technique for Cap and his team as a quick quick way of working out what to spend time discussing and certainly one I may steal.

Designing for Performance

It was great to see so many speakers at a design conference talk about Designing for Performance. Yesenia from Vox Media talked about this in detail building her case that “Fast sites build trust” and that “Fast sites are memorable”. Yesenia was a big advocate for performance as a design feature, not just a technical problem. She invests heavily in creating performance budgets to help guide decisions as “everything, every decision has a [performance] consequence”. Yesenia uses simple guides such as “Our pages should weigh no more than 400kb and make no more than 15 requests” or “Our pages should take no more than 10 seconds to load over a sub 3G connection.”

Yesenia then uses this to base her design decisions on e.g. If she wanted to add large high resolution images which took her over her performance budget, then she’d have to have a try and remove or optimise something else to allow her to stick within her budget. In some cases, she may have to drop her idea altogether. A common theme from this talk was about doing more with less questioning, how much design do you need to differentiate?

Patrick Hamann from FT.com also told us about 2G Tuesdays at Facebook where the office WiFi is reduced to a 2G speed to encourage everyone to experience what its like to browse the web on a slow connection.

Universal design

Browsers are everywhere, we’re no longer just looking at phones, tablets, laptops and desktops — they’re in cameras, built into fridges, even some taps have them! Anna Debenham gave a talk about Console Broswers and explained the need to shift our thinking from platform specific design thinking to designing for the Web as a whole. Did you know that 26% of 14–24 year olds in the UK use consoles to visit websites?

Anna summed up her experience of using consoles to browse the web as “a bit weird”. The interaction is strange, due to having many other input methods to consider such as voice, second screens, no keyboards and many more buttons. Anna also warned not to trust UA Strings as Google Analytics doesn’t always report them accurately, if at all.

Process

Ryan O’Connor from the BBC took us through how they used Design Sprints to re-design the BBC App. He talked a lot about how embedded User Research is at the BBC and the importance of getting your ideas in front of your audience as soon as you can, be it paper prototypes, guerrilla testing, or formal lab testing. A number of speakers touched on empathy and the need to truly listen to your users. Jack Sheppard defined Empathy very succinctly “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another” and how it might sound simple, but listening is hard.

Danny Hearn from John Lewis took us through the process that he’s developed by combining techniques from Value Proposition Design and Business Model Generation to create an experimentation culture of constant testing.

Our very own Colin McFarland (from Skyscanner) took the audience through our Experimentation approach and the journey we’ve been on to use data to validate decisions. Colin touched on some of the pain points from a designers POV and the need to accept that not all your ideas will succeed. In fact 90% of experiments fail. There was good debate afterwards on whether data driven design holds designers back and how to combat incrementalism through use of a design vision. Colin shared an example of the Skyscanner homepage which had been tested 75 times in the last year. In summary Colin’s advice was to “Design like you’re right and Test like you’re wrong”.

Often as designers we design for the ideal world where internet connections are good, users find what they want and there are no hiccups. But what about all the other states? Scott Hurff from Tinder sees the job of a Product Designer to bring humanity into products and help people who think in flow states to move easily between them.

He gave us an overview of his process and took us through each of the states we should consider when designing products:

• Blank state e.g. first time use, cleared data, no results
• Loading state
• Partial state
• Error state
• Ideal state

Scott used the real world example of mirrors in a lift keeping people occupied whilst getting from one view to another and how they are used to create distraction. More info on this can be found in his book ‘Designing Products People Love’.

Failure

Another common theme across the two days was failure. A quote Nick Finck, Product Design Manager @ Facebook shared which I quite liked was:

“Failure is not falling down, it is not getting up again” — Mary Pickford.

Rob Jones, Co-founder and Creative Director of FanDuel took us through his career to date and some of the mistakes and failings he made. Did you know that he had three failed start-ups before FanDuel? The biggest difference in his approach with FanDuel was applying many of the methodologies as outlined in The Lean Start-Up getting through the Build, Measure, Learn loop as quick as possible in order to learn early.

Great couple days and some awesome speakers with some of the best gifs on the planet. I’ll leave you with my favourite: