In the innovation process, we often prototype something as quickly as possible, to learn from the prototype, and to throw it away. It takes thousands of “No” ideas to find one “Yes” idea. These methods and mindsets are applied at the early stage of designing a product. However, it’s still possible to find better solutions later in progress. What would you do when you see something much better later in the process？
In July, I had a project to design a feature that allows conference staff to trade their shifts on our events management platform. As UX Designer, I started by pulling engineers and product managers in the same room to sketch out initial ideas because I want to put pencils before pixels instead of limiting ourselves to a certain idea. We came up with 3–4 ideas in the meeting, but all ideas had the same base as a traditional market where one person offers their shifts to trade and others bid on it. Like Craigslist, when both sides agree on a trade, the trade will be completed. The only difference between the ideas is just simplifying the process. However, we didn’t notice our ideas were limited to the traditional trade model. I went back to my desk to figure out the actual UX to make it work.
The thing is, no matter how much we simplify the trading process. If a complete trade process needs to wait for someone to post, others to bid on the one they want, and both sides need to agree on it. It is already a very long journey. Needless to say, that requires users to check back on the market all the time and be the first person to bid to get what they want. It adds a lot of unnecessary workload to the employees. I started seeing those inconveniences and struggles in the process. Yet, it still didn’t catch my attention to think about a different solution because the idea of a traditional market makes me think it is just the necessary steps for a trade to happen. I never questioned that the traditional trading method is probably not the right solution for this feature.
We carried on with the design and finished it. Meanwhile, I have communicated with the team on how I feel about this project is more complicated than we expected. We put the design in front of our users and tested it. The result was good but not great because we can only test how users navigate through the UI, but we can’t test how users will behave in the real market. With the deadline approaching and us in a meeting, an engineer proposed to rethink from the start point. Taking the use case as an employee looking into getting a shift they want, we can let them put in a ‘want,’ and if the system finds a matching want from two users, the trade will happen automatically. Others started to contribute to this idea, saying “we can now let users trade open shifts that haven’t been filled,” and “we can make three or more people trade together if two people don’t make a match.” We sketched a whole new plan at the meeting. Everyone was excited.
Now the hard question is, with the time we have left, engineers have to start working on it immediately in order to make it on time but we don’t even have a design for the new concept yet. We followed our core value, “every voice matters.” Everyone expressed their feelings and concerns. Together we decided to make the change. Because everyone agreed to the change, we all tied together to work towards the new goal. The trust and collaboration we built within the team helped us to work through this tough change.
One thing I learned from this process is that the innovation process can be applied in every step of the way. I remember when we decided to pivot, everyone was concerned about my feelings because the design was so far into the process. We had designed out the entire UI and tested it with users by then. They were worried that I would be unhappy to throw all that work into a trash can. However, I believe without learning from the design we have done, we couldn’t land on this new idea. So I don’t feel bad at all, instead, I think any ideas or feedback that will make the product better. I am always open to listening to it.
