How New Designers are Helping to Transform an Iconic Company
It was necessity, not choice, that led me to hire UX Designers who have never had a UX job before. When I joined Weight Watchers in 2015 I never thought of it as a tech company, or a company I’d ever consider joining. However, when a startup I cofounded needed a soft landing, Weight Watchers turned out to be a perfect fit.
At the time, Weight Watchers was going through a complete product and tech transformation. They were rebuilding their ten year old product, rewriting the code base and redesigning the entire web and mobile experience.
When I took over the design team at the end of May 2015, the team consisted mostly of consultants. All of the design work I was seeing represented isolated pieces of a disjointed puzzle. There were no personas, no sitemap, no use cases, no nav structure and the new product was supposed to launch in November!
I knew I needed to build a team fast.
A few years ago I taught a General Assembly course to a class of graduating designers. In that class, I met incredibly smart, talented and hungry young people, so I turned to GA again to look for talent.
Over the next three months, all of the design consultants were gone and Weight Watchers had the beginnings of a solid new design team. Thanks to the hard work of newly revived product and engineering, we did launch on time. What was amazing to me is how a few designers fresh out of General Assembly rose to the occasion — they were instrumental in redesigning the complete product experience and ultimately helped the company return to a path of growth.
Redesign of the Weight Watchers visitor site experience:
The secret to building successful teams — hire great people, set them up for success.
Hire great people
This is the most important step — you can’t mess this up. You can hire by pedigree (CMU, Stanford, Google, etc. alumni), experience (years on the job at great companies), and raw talent. They are not necessarily all tied together, and the latter is the most important one. When hiring new designers, that’s the one you have to get right.
There are few things to look for. Are they great problem solvers? Do they know the fundamentals of Interaction Design? Do they understand the User Centered Design methodology? Do they have a good sense of design aesthetics? Are they eager to learn? Are they open to feedback? Are they easy to work with? Are they motivated by your company’s mission?
You can feel these things out by doing a few different things. Interviews and portfolios reviews work great. For designers coming with limited work experience, I give a complete design problem to solve and have them present to the team. Here’s one of the briefs:
Brief
A supermarket chain wants to increase customer engagement and bring their brand experience into the digital era. Some of the ideas include building an app customers can use while shopping. Another idea is to build digital kiosks in the stores. Should there be a website too?Questions to consider
How are you approaching this problem? What are all of the steps in the process? Who are your users? (How do you figure this out?) What are your users’ needs? (You can make assumptions for this assignment, but talk about the process.)Deliverables
Clearly define and articulate the design problem including the goals you’re trying to achieve and how you’ll measure success. Come up with 2 hypotheses of how you’ll solve the problem. Pick one direction and explore it with a few representative customer journeys, mock-ups and wireframes.
I tell them to spend just a couple of hours on it and leave the rest pretty open. I also casually offer to review the work together before the presentation and go through an iteration with them. Offering to do an iteration together is a small investment on your part, but it’s an important insight if the candidates take you up on the offer. It will also give you a clear glimpse into how well they will work together with you.
The most successful candidates, the ones I hired, have been the ones that have gone out and interviewed people in an actual supermarket. They built personas, went through a few iterations, user tested their hypotheses with real would be users, took the initiative to go through a round of feedback with me and incorporated the feedback beautifully into the design.
They also had a perfectly crafted presentation tailored to their audience with beautiful high fidelity mockups, illustrations and wireframes. Their lack of job experience did not matter at that point, I knew I was hiring future superstar designers.
Evolution of the Weight Watchers iOS app:
Set them up for Success
Give ownership, autonomy and responsibility
There are two ways to give people an opportunity for growth, which usually entails more ownership and responsibility. One is to see if they’re already performing at a higher level and then make it official. This is the most common and conventional way. The other one is to give someone with a lot of potential an opportunity that has more responsibility than they’ve had experience with, and empower them to succeed at it.
The latter is the one I prefer and that I find works much better for the designers on my team, and for me personally. It has happened to me twice in my own career. The first time was at Adobe, when Steve Johnson (now VP of Design at Netflix) hired me as an inexperienced designer. I had never designed desktop software or been a lead on a product, and he gave me full design ownership over Adobe Premiere Elements. He then spent countless hours teaching and training me how to succeed in that role. My success equaled the success of the product, and Steve’s success as a manager.
We had so much work to focus on at Weight Watchers, that admittedly it wasn’t a fully conscious choice that led me to give our new designers so much responsibility, but now I realize it was essential to their success.
A sense of ownership and autotomy motivates designers to work hard and figure things out for themselves. It encourages them to proactively work with product managers, engineers and other designers.
By giving really smart people ownership, autonomy and responsibility, you’re sending a message that you believe in them and that they can do it. Creative and entrepreneurial designers perform best when they feel empowered to move things forward, and they’re motivated by the big challenges in front of them.
Set designers up for success by giving them the confidence to succeed.
Transformation of the Weight Watchers subscriber experience:
Rely on your own experience, carefully
Sometimes experience brings a lot of baggage to the party. It’s important to use your experience to help, and not hinder the creative process. You’ve hired amazing people, now step aside and let them imagine things even you can’t. To enable them to do this, you have to help them see problems through the lens of your experience.
This is the most important part and where your experience truly matters. Help your designers think through the problems and to frame them the right way. Ask the right questions. Find examples and analogies. Draw illustrative parallels. Don’t weigh in with your opinions, rather allow your designers to connect the dots.
One of the ways that works for me, that I picked up from Matias Duarte when we worked together at Palm, is to just go through my own thinking out loud with a small product team. Most of the time I’m not sure where it will lead, but I feel comfortable enough not to be afraid to just go for it.
This usually happens in front of a whiteboard or Post-it easel pads. We think aloud, draw, and write things out together. We always start with the basics — goals, needs, moments in the journey, core use cases, the context of the whole member experience. Sometimes we get stuck, but we always seem to work through it and eventually find that elusive key angle that helps us focus on the right problem.
Set designers up for success by helping them frame the design problem.
Create a collaborative environment
Feedback loops and iteration are some of the most important components to good design. You need to create a collaborative environment inside and outside of your team. Design stand-ups, design reviews and team discussions should happen as often as possible. They also need to happen in a very structured and productive way. Designers should be prepared for these conversations by clearly being able to articulate the problem they need help with and what kind of feedback they want.
Outside of the design team, designers should have a solid and collaborative relationship with product managers and engineers. It takes experience to create those relationships and make them work, so it’s on you as the manager to help new designers build them. When designers are leads on their products, it makes it much easier as they’re always invited to participate in product discussions.
Set designers up for success by creating a collaborative environment where everyone is on equal footing.
Invest in people, not products
Ten years after my experience at Adobe, the biggest investment someone made in me was when Sam Shank funded a company I cofounded and joined the board. His main investment was teaching me how to raise capital, recruit a team, build a business, create a successful product, get customers and ultimately sell the company. Sam’s investment was in me, not the product, because ultimately my success equaled the success of the product, and his success as an investor.
When working with new designers, I try to spend most of my time in the room with the designers thinking and working through the design problems. I’m there as a sounding board, to give feedback, to ask questions, to encourage exploring other directions, to help look for examples and to see how we can apply those examples to our problems. The best use of my time is trying to create opportunities for the designers on my team to be better designers.
Investing in product instead of people is short-term thinking. Investing in people working on the product will create better products in the long run. Aside from the things you can pay for, the biggest investment you should make is your time.
Here are some great things to invest in when it comes to designers:
- Setting up a creative physical environment
- Tools designers need to succeed from Wacom tablets to standing desks
- Learning opportunities like conferences, classes and workshops
- Developing complementary skills to their core design expertise
- Public speaking and presentations skills
- Design reviews and working through design problems together
- Navigating the organization to help build relationships with product, engineering, marketing, business and ops
Set designers up for success by investing the time into feeding their passion.
Hire smart, talented and passionate designers. Give them big stretch goals. Invest in their success.
Today we have a balanced team with people from General Assembly, CMU, Google, Stanford, and Cooper. Every day I’m impressed by the leadership, creativity, talent and level of work from our newer (previously inexperienced) designers who continue to surpass all of my expectations.
