The Story of a UX Guild; Amazingly aligned and determined to grow
An Introduction to Divar and its scale
Divar is the leading online classified ads platform in Iran with +32 million registered mobile numbers on its website, Android, and iOS applications, and 350,000 new daily listings.
At first, same as Craigslist, the product grew horizontally in all verticals. After a few years, the strategy changed to avoid letting upcoming vertical competitors disrupt its market dominancy in the automotive, real estate, goods, and recruitment verticals.
Why is it time for us to start sharing internationally?
At the beginning of 2020, we started our Persian design blog and the first-ever design team podcast in Iran! But, I believe we have a lot to share with the world too. Some of the reasons are listed below:
- In 2020, Divar’s Android and iOS applications have been used in over 44 million unique mobile devices.
- Iran’s official language is Persian, which is an RTL language. 80% of Divar users’ device language is Persian as well. There are studies around the topic, but can we say designing RTL using the Persian language and characters is one of our unique areas of expertise?
- Divar mobile applications are award winners of the most accessible application in the 2020 Iranian web and mobile festival.
- We are the largest UX team in the whole country with 28 UX professionals.
- Now that I am writing this article, we have designed and implemented a Design System, Sonnat, for three platforms. Also, at the start of 2020, we documented and published it as the first Persian design system ever!
The new design era at Divar
I joined Divar in May 2018. By that time, three big cross-functional teams were working on three main parts of the platform: Search and Submit, Communication, and Review. The VP of Product had a solid vision of how designers can help the product within the organizational structure. He defined a designer as someone who owns a problem and is responsible for its metrics.
A Designer is someone who owns a problem and is responsible for its metrics.
Having that vision in mind, Shayan, who is the UX Director at Divar right now, diagnosed that to have designers focusing on solving people’s problems, we need to free their time and mind from pushing pixels. That is why he convinced the heads of Product, Android, iOS, and Front-end chapters on designing and developing a design system; as a language to communicate and a tool to automate some parts of interface design processes.
I was his first hire. But now that I’m writing this article, I’m the UX Design Lead at Divar, leading a chapter of 11 UX Designers distributed in 5 product verticals. There are 4 chapters in Divar’s UX Guild:
- UX Design
- UX Research
- UX Engineering
- UX Writing
The progress over three years
Not only the Design maturity of the organization increased, but the UX Guild also grew significantly in many other aspects. We will write about the impact of this change in the future too. So, please take a moment to follow our publication and stay tuned!
- Number of people: ~300 to ~1000
- Number of cross-functional product teams: from 3 to 8
- Number of UX Specialists: from 2 to 28
- Designer to Developer ratio: from 1/20 to 1/6
- Number of researchers: from 0 to 8
- Designer to Product Manager ratio: 1/1 fixed
A few words on organizational structure
Divar follows a customized version of the Spotify agile scaling model. Long story short, these context-related customizations were necessary to avoid the common mistakes which make cross-functional teams dysfunctional.
There are many ways to organize cross-functional teams, but the most vital factors for us to design the organizational structure were to make sure:
- We have a meaningful and long-term mission for each team.
- They are sustainably independent in their decision-making and agile processes.
In the context of a classified ads platform, you can organize your teams around user experience, the same as Airbnb, which has separate squads for the host and guest experiences of their service. Or, you can define them around features, similar to Facebook, which has teams that work on News Feed, Messenger, and Profile. In our case, solutions are getting created with the focus on product verticals, such as automobiles, real estate, or jobs.
Why do we call it a UX Guild?
The term guild was the closest concept to what we have envisioned. I think of our Design Guild as a hybrid system — 4 UX Chapters of amazing creatives with different specialties. It is a combination of embedded and centralized chapter structures with a united mission, relatively well-defined growth paths, and aligned information flow.
In their book, Design Leadership Handbook, Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery explain the pros and cons of embedded, centralized, and hybrid team structures. In my experience, the most important cons of embedding designers in cross-functional teams, or EPD model, are:
- Inconsistency of user experience across different parts of the platform
- Lack of alignment in parallel projects, which can cause duplicate efforts in different squads
- Losing growth opportunities by focusing on a limited problem space and working in isolation from other designers
Having 28 people with four types of UX expertise united and connected, we have great opportunities to overcome any kinds of potential risks. Below, you can find some of these opportunities that we have nurtured at the heart of our day-to-day work to get the most out of a UX Guild!
#1 Defining Principles
To guarantee the consistency of a scalable system, we agreed on some principles in our processes, tools, and delivery methods. To name a few:
#2 Weekly sync sessions
We have a super-efficient one-hour meeting at the beginning of every week, where every member of the guild briefly shares their ongoing tasks with the guild. There are three key benefits in these sessions:
- A shared document for every week, including some bullet points of everyone’s ongoing tasks, ensures that even absent people do not miss anything.
- If anyone’s tasks are dependent on someone else in the guild, we will mention their names to make them informed and help them with planning their time.
- Leaders can diagnose and eliminate any obstacles out of their chapter’s way.
#3 Weekly Co-learnings and Seasonal Critique Sessions
Currently, eight cross-functional teams are working on different parts of the platform. Designers and user researchers working in those teams may face the risk of losing sight of the other areas of the platform, which means they are unable to learn from other’s experiences. Seasonal design and research critiques sessions keep our product knowledge updated and sets the stage to learn from a diverse range of problems everyone is solving across the platform.
Also, we participate in weekly co-learning sessions with a variety of design-related topics. To date, we have had over 40 sessions presented by ourselves or guest mentors.
#4 Collaborative Activities and Studies
Two examples of the activities we do together as a guild:
- UX Engineering, Design, and Writing Collaboration: Documenting and publishing Divar Design System, aka Sonnat, the first Persian Design System.
- UX Research and Design Collaboration: Conducting cross-team usability studies
#5 Knowledge sharing with the community
It is a mission for us to share our knowledge and experience with the community. We grow through sharing because:
- Public writing and speaking will make us powerful communicators in any form.
- Sharing opens the doors for getting feedback from a more diverse audience.
- We can educate the tech community to care about what we value the most. For instance, we are pioneers of accessibility and inclusive design in the country.
- We believe transparency of our values, processes, and impact will attract other professionals with the same approach to join us.
It is just the beginning!
What you read in this article are solutions and practices we have discovered along the way so far. If you are interested in following us throughout the journey, please follow the publication for the upcoming articles and case studies!
