What is a ‘Design Day’ at Auto Trader?
Every quarter, the Design and Research Team at Auto Trader holds a ‘Design Day’. It’s a great opportunity to get the team together outside of our normal day-to-day activities to share knowledge and talk about any challenges we’re facing.
Every Design Day typically consists of:
- Team updates
- Workshops
- Lightning talks
- Some sort of social outing
Our most recent Design Day was on 9th June (my third since I’ve joined Auto Trader) and it absolutely blew me away! Nearly half of the 20 people who took part in the day gave talks or helped run workshops.This is a living testament of our team living out one of our design principles, ‘forge collaboships’, which is all about making use of our collective team expertise and forging ‘collaborative relationships’ to create something special.
First, Head of Product Design, Chris Collingridge, gave a quick introduction and outline of what was coming up. He also touched on the successes we’ve had as a team lately, and thanked us for our hard work. We officially welcomed colleagues who had joined since our last Design Day, and were joined by Millie, the research graduate who will start in the autumn. Everyone got a little pumped up for the activities and as most do in a one day workshop, took a mental note of when lunch would arrive.
Activity one: Horrible design at Auto Trader
Portfolio Design Lead, Lee Murray, introduced his activity, ‘Horrible design at Auto Trader,’ influenced by Jared Spool’s ‘Despicable Design.’ The title was definitely intriguing, wasn’t that the opposite of what we were supposed to be doing as designers at Auto Trader? Lee was helped by Product Designer, Lauren Digby to facilitate, and the pair kept us on our toes, revealing each step of the activity as time went on. It was great because he also brought in colleagues from across the business to get an array of perspectives.
First, we picked our team names and team songs. I was on Team Cruella and our song was ‘It’s a small world after all’, I can’t think of anything worse than that on repeat! Lee then tasked us with taking our current design for a car advert and making the experience worse.
A few of the ‘horrible’ ideas we came up with:
- Love island sound ‘I got a text’ every time a potential buyer messages a seller
- You can only scroll horizontally
- All text should alternate between uppercase and lowercase letters
- No information architecture, putting all the information on one line
- Price always listed as ‘You’re getting a great deal’
After we agreed on each of the ‘horrible’ elements to add into our designs, we spent some time quickly sketching it into reality. As designers, we’re typically trying to do anything we can to improve a user’s experience, so this exercise pained us!
We had a look at our ‘horrible design’ and identified which of the features were wrong, and how we could improve them. We took these features back into our original advert and saw where we could incorporate them. I’ve never done anything like this and was shocked at how many things we felt like we could improve. It’s a really interesting way to design and kind of reminds me of the ‘worst possible idea technique.’ It was a good opportunity to get the team thinking in a different way and generate different ideas to the norm.
Activity Two: Designing from a conversation
Next, Content Designer, Rachael Edwards walked us through her activity; ‘Designing from a conversation.’ I helped to facilitate, but Rach was definitely the mastermind behind the workshop.
As Content Designers, our goal is to make content concise, easy to understand and human. As Rach said, ‘The point of this workshop is to become more comfortable in bringing everyday language into our design, and calling out our own jargon, or technical language.’ One of our favourite pieces of advice on how to write more naturally is to ask yourself ‘How would you say this to a friend?’ and this workshop did just that!
She began by giving us an overview of our brand archetype and the basic user personas we identified as being our three most-targeted types of customer at Auto Trader. For some people on the team, this was their first look at these personas, so it was a good opportunity to take some time to get familiar with them. She got colleagues into a Content Design state of mind by asking questions like:
- How might they speak?
- How might they behave?
- What might they care about?
- How would you speak to them?
Rach then split the team into smaller groups to identify user and business goals and needs. For the purpose of this workshop, Rach didn’t confine us to strictly Auto Trader scenarios, but we looked at situations that we could come across outside of our work life, like a trip to the cinema, or selling your house.
Next up, having the conversation. She asked the groups to have a normal conversation based on their topic, thinking about the questions a user may ask, and the answers that the ‘product’ may give if it were a person. After reviewing the notes on the conversation, they prioritised the key moments and put them into the most logical order.
Then came the fun part; designing from the conversation. The team sketched out the key stages of their conversation as if it was an online product or experience. While these were very quick paper prototypes, it gave them an opportunity to consider the main copy elements and how they could bring in a conversational tone.
It was a really good opportunity for the Design and Research Team to get into the mind of a Content Designer and really put some thought into the copy we are using in our designs. Hopefully, the team will take this learning to think about answering users’ questions upfront, and it can influence their design decisions.
Activity Three: Designing with emotions
It’s a tough act being the last to present after a full day of activities, but Portfolio Design Lead, George Burton had it covered with an activity that got us all on our feet. The last activity of the day was ‘Designing with Emotions’.
George gave a brilliant recap of what it means to design with emotion and why it’s important, including some famous examples, such as the Eames chair (1956).The goal of designing with emotions is to think about how you want your users to feel and how it leads to better and more connected designs.
Next we looked at different emotions (did you know there are 102?!?), and different ranges of them. We then participated in an experiment similar to the one Dacher Keltner ran to determine the 27 distinct categories of emotions, where we were shown an image or video and needed to choose which emotion we felt. It was really interesting to share our perspectives and see how different they could all be!
George walked us through how important it is to consider emotion in design and why we should move away from a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP). We need to go beyond the obvious functional tasks when designing experiences to understand how our users are feeling. Senior Product Designers Chris Bailey and Lee Jeffrey joined in on the conversation to talk more in-depth about designing with emotions using our Auto Trader Design System (ATDS) and a case study of our MLP finance experience.
For the final activity, we got into groups and were given an emotion. The challenge? We had 45 minutes to bring that emotion to life through a movie. We had a lot of props and fun stuff to help us out, and we didn’t have any rules except that we couldn’t say or write the emotion or let any of the other teams know what it was. After 45 minutes, we debuted our short films and tried to get the rest of the team to guess the emotion. The movies were hilarious and I think a couple colleagues missed their calling as an actor!
Between running around the office and watching the short films, the end of the day was full of laughs. We were even able to take a few of the stills from the films to turn into gifs that we love using in slack. Fun and games aside, it was a really good opportunity to rethink settling for an MVP and moving towards an MLP, to not only make the experience usable, but have users feel delighted and positive after they accomplish their goal.
Overall, we had an amazing day. This Design Day is just one example of how we try to keep our Design and Research team connected and educated. Even though we’re all working on different products, with different teams across the business, we know that at least once a quarter we can get together to do a few activities, listen to a couple of talks and share any challenges or successes we have. It also gives each of us an opportunity to practice our workshop and public speaking skills.
I highly recommend running a ‘Design Day’ for your team! If you have any questions, or ideas on what we can do in our next one, feel free to reach out.
