De-constructing design as a non-designer
I’ve noticed a curious pattern in questions asked by founders or product owners at product/entrepreneurial meetups.
Most of them can be generalised into any one of these:
- How do I improve my website/app’s design?
- How do I know if the design is “good enough”?
- How do I develop an eye for “good design”?
- How do I work with designers?
All of the above questions have one thing in common — a lack of basic design sensitivity amongst business and product owners. Needless to say, most of these people, do not have a background in design. They feel that design is this magic hat that will conjure magical designs out of it each time you wave your wand at it. As a business owner and a designer, that particular image really appeals to me.
But if you aren’t a magician, fear not.
I’ve broken down the pattern of designing products into a series of small and easy activities. With these steps, hopefully, you’ll make the journey from being clueless to naively confident in digital design.
Ask
Ask questions. Ask as many as you come up with. Yes, even the ones that sound silly in your head. The thing is, over time I’ve realised, that even with the silly questions, there comes a better clarity that’s helpful in approaching a design problem.
Say you have to redesign a signup form. Some of the questions could be:
- What are we trying to achieve with the form — More signups? Better aesthetics? Faster completion? What else?
- How will this help us in our product’s long term goals? In terms of revenue? Engagement? Satisfaction?
- How soon can the signup be completed before the core product is experienced?
- What are the existing problems with the current flow?
- What are the metrics that will define the success of the redesign? What do we want to take up as a form of metric? Conversions? Average completion time? Drop off rate?
As you can see, all these questions help you and your team set important context to the problem. What more questions would you add to the above list? Even if they seem small and unnecessary, it’s better to ask. There’s always the danger of falling into the trap of assuming.
Remember, when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME. Brilliant piece of advice, that.
Look around
Always keep an eye out for what trends your competition and industry leaders are following. Their design decisions will elevate your product’s baseline to a mainstream acceptance. Whatever problems you encounter, the solution will most probably have been implemented by somebody else.
No use reinventing the wheel. All creative ideas build upon what came before. Nothing is completely original.
Analyze
Design is highly subjective. You may feel your app could do with a design overhaul. After all, it is easy to get influenced when every product around is redesigning its brand, typeface, interface.
Resist the urge.
Take a good hard look at your product’s usage and analytics. There’s a ton of insights waiting to be extracted from your existing users. Don’t fix anything that isn’t broken and build forward from there. Just because a one-click signup with amorphous illustrations looks sexy, doesn’t mean it’ll work wonders for you.
Show and Tell
Design works best when it is not done in isolation. Whether it is a work in progress or your 7th iteration, show it around. Make it public to solicit a response. Showcase it to people from different teams (okay you can avoid the invitation to marketing, but they’re not that bad).
Get as much feedback as you can. Sometimes, people far removed from the problem are able to give incredible insights to the problem at hand. That #FBFBFB background looks great on a P3 display iMac, but becomes hard to differentiate on mainstream budget displays.
Validate
This is the last and most important step to evaluate the success or failure of a design change. A lot of people avoid this by simply trusting what they call -their “instinct”. That may work on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but design is not so forgiving.
Heatmaps, A/B testing, User Testing, hover and scroll behaviour, Peer Testing. Try VWO, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Crazyegg, Optimizely. All of these ensure the effectiveness of your decisions. You may love those gradient buttons, but are your users clicking enough on them?
That’s it.
This is all you need to start talking design. There are plenty of articles and resources on the internet that can help you narrow down your problem areas and develop the necessary skill set. Stanford d.school has a great 90 minute crash course that will introduce you to basic design skills.
Or you could just give us a call. We’d love to help you out with your product.
