Doing the hard yards
Most people who come into design do so through a desire to make things better, improve people’s lives, and create things they can be proud of. This is the glory work — the scoring of a try in rugby, or a touchdown in gridiron, the moment when the crowd stands on their feet and cheers.
But to score that try and get the acclaim, there’s often some hard, unglamorous, unpopular work to do first. And being a great designer sometimes needs you to get mud on your face.
Where you work on an existing product that people use often and are very accustomed to, making changes to get good groundwork in place can be especially tricky.
We recently had this experience at Auto Trader, when we updated the core part of our retailer-facing product, where dealers add and advertise vehicles, and review how well their adverts are doing.
Why it’s hard
When people use tools frequently (often many times a day), they walk up a ladder of expertise. This is similar to the four stages of competence. People start being unconsciously incompetent before they become aware of the tool or the need for it, and over time may climb the ladder to being unconsciously competent — where they no longer need to think at all about how to use the product.
When you change your product you knock them backwards down the ladder, meaning they need to expend more effort to use it or feel as if they no longer know what they’re doing. And no-one enjoys being knocked down a ladder.
Minimise change
With our recent update, we explicitly set out to minimise the change wherever we could. While this was sometimes difficult — especially where we saw things that could benefit from improvement — the main goal was to transition people as painlessly as possible so that we had a better platform on which to make improvements.
Be responsive to what you get wrong
When you have tens of thousands of frequent users on your product every day, you’ll inevitably get some stuff wrong when you change it. Some of this is only really discoverable when you launch at scale.
For example, one of the improvements we did make was to change the way that car adverts were previewed for retailers. Although this change resulted in a much more accurate preview than they’d had previously, we discovered that some people were copying the text from the old preview and pasting it into other systems. So although the preview was now better, we’d inadvertently broken a workflow for a group of people.
It’s really important to be actively listening for issues like this and being prepared to respond quickly. Once we understood the underlying cause of the issue (which was initially reported as “the preview is worse”) we implemented an easier way to copy all the text to use in another system while still keeping the improvement to the preview.
Understand it won’t be popular
You probably won’t win a popularity contest by changing a core tool that thousands of people use for their work every day (remember you’re knocking them down a ladder).
What you do need to do is be able to explain why it’s worth doing, and have people in your organisation support the change even when it gets difficult. For example, within Auto Trader we have teams who spend their whole day talking to retailers to help them succeed and support them using our systems. These colleagues were fundamental to the success or failure of the change, through their ability to help users and to collect, collate, and prioritise feedback.
However it is you get direct feedback from your users, make sure that everyone is prepared for the change and can help make it a success.
What it enables
In the end going through this process isn’t bags of fun, and it needs to make things better for you and your users in the longer run. In our case this update provided:
· specific technical benefits (such as the ability for retailers to manage many more cars effectively in our system)
· specific user benefits (making the whole application responsive)
· most importantly, the ability to many more teams across the business to make rapid improvements to the platform, which was previously difficult and time-consuming
We’ve already been able to release features and make improvements that would have been impossible to achieve in the old platform, and which users really benefit from and appreciate.
But when we — as designers — enjoy these celebratory moments of delivering things people love, we need to remember the muddy faces and grazed knees that enabled us to get here.
