What I learned about product design from my interviews at Quora.

In May 2015, I decided to apply for a product design internship at Quora.
At that time, it wasn’t very clear what “product design” meant to me but the description on the careers page definitely resonated with me. When I received the first email from the recruiter, I decided to prepare it as much as possible. What I learned definitely changed the way I think about design. This is what I learned.

“Design is a set of decision about a product”- Rebekah Cox

Rebekah Cox is Quora’s first employee. She writes some thoughtful stuff here: http://rebekah.quora.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWaoNNAuhBI

This video is the first thing I watched from a Quora’s designer. It is a 5 minutes presentation where Rebekah talks about design and how at Quora they define design. I remember some things she said that really stayed with me.

She says:

Design is a set of decision about a product

Great design is all the work you don’t ask the people who use your product to do

The problems you choose to solve are as important as how you solve them

I really like the idea that designing is making decisions. You make these decisions based on what you really want your product to do and your product is defined by all these little decisions you make along the way and thinking of design as a set of decision really makes you focus on purpose and goals of a product.
Thinking this way made me realize about what I call “comprehending the situation”. Everything is about defining what you are trying to achieve, who you are designing for, why do they need it. Clear the situation changes everything and really makes it easier to justify your choices.

“We shape our tools and our tools shape us.”- Wilson Miner

David Cole is the Director of Design at Quora. I read a lot of his posts that really inspired me. In one of his post he talks about a designer, Wilson Miner, (I had no idea who he was at that time) but more precisely about a talk Wilson gave “When we build”. That talk definitely changed the way I look and feel about design.

You can see the talk here: https://vimeo.com/34017777

I’ll quote David Cole but in that talk “Wilson drew a connection. He argued that in the same way cars and roads transformed the way we lived our lives 50–60 years ago, screens are transforming our lives right now, and will continue to do so for decades to come.”

In another talk, Wilson says that sometimes he has kind of an inferiority complex comparing himself to architect, industrial designer, who makes things with an even more tangible impact.

But Wilson says:

The things that we build for screen, they just as important, in term of their impact on how we live and who we are

When he says that roads changed the way we lived our lives 50–60 years ago, I definitely believe that screens are changing our lives right now and will change it even stronger in the decades to come. Wilson made a strong statement in that talk, he says that what is on these screens are important, what is on these screens will define who we are, will define how we live, and we ,designers, are the ones who decide what goes on them, and we have that responsibility. Wilson really helps me to get more confidence.

“Products like Facebook and Twitter are spaces that people don’t just use but exist in.”

Another thing that really inspired me was from http://modish.quora.com/Process-is-Process, in the last paragraph Henry Modisett talks about architecture and how designers can be influenced by it. He says that products like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter are not only websites that people use. People live in it.

They are environments that form behavior. People don’t behave in the
same way on Facebook, on Reddit or on Twitter. Just like in real life, we don’t behave the same everywhere. The idea that we can designed spaces that create special behaviors just changed something in my vision of design and mainly on social products. I realized that product design decisions are very subtle. Ask people to use their real name and they will definitely behave in a certain way. Limit the number of characters of a post and people will find new ways of writing.
I think we can learned a lot from this parallel with the “physical world”.
People don’t use the same tone if they write an email or write a message in a chat room (Slack). If you look at Reddit, it’s messy, but it’s necessary, it creates some behavior and people like it. People would not act the same if it was a clean website. On Medium I have the feeling that I will read interesting stuff and It give me the feeling that I can write interesting stories too and people will listen to me.

As in real life, we need to have these differents spaces on the Internet, we need to be able to behave in a lot of different ways, cause we like it and need it. And we, designers, can create these new spaces.

“Designers will code” — David Cole

During the past 3 years, I mostly heard that designers should design, developers should code. I heard that it’s a totally different job, and coding is not what we expect from a designer. It always felt weird to me, as I have always been attracted by programming. Reading that Quora’s designers must code, and even that they sometimes design in the browsers was so great to hear. It motivated me to continue to learn coding, as a designer I want to be able to build things, for real! Even if it’s just a prototype. More important, everything you design will only live if it’s coded. I believe it’s important to understand for what we are designing for, and learn to code helps a lot. I am thankful to Quora to give me the confidence to continue to learn coding as a designer. I used to design in the browser feeling guilty.

We spend hours designing for a medium that’s interactive and responsive, but we start by producing mockups that are static and inflexible. If great design is not only aesthetics but also how it works, then it’s time to make development part of the creative process. — Jeremy Bell of Teehan+Lax

You can read a great article from David Cole about this here : http://irondavy.quora.com/Designers-Will-Code

To conclude,

I realized what product decisions was, and how these little decisions are so important and really shape a product. You really have to define what you want your product to do, how you want people to feel using it. Now, every time I use a product, I ask myself: why did they make this decision? Why did they decide to make this action complicated? How am I am suppose to feel?Why using a feed? This is the importance of making the right decisions.

Thank you for reading!

Maxime Beneteau

I’m studying Interaction design at L’école de Design de Nantes in France.
maximebeneteau.com