What is the Ideal Design Process that our team follows at Cars24?
This article talks about the design process that the Cars24 design team follows to deliver a seamless product.
A good design process is required if a team wishes to deliver a product efficiently and optimally. Understanding this, we came together as a team, under the guidance of our senior designers, to try and build an ideal design process for ourselves.
Here at Cars24, we follow a two-week sprint structure to incorporate tasks to be done. For those who don’t know what a sprint structure is, let me help you out.
Sprints are time-boxed periods of one week to one month, during which a product owner, scrum master, and scrum team work to complete a specific product addition. During a sprint, work is done to create new features based on the user stories and backlog. A new sprint starts immediately after the current sprint ends.
Keeping this in mind, all the designers came together to build an ideal design process over a few weeks. After a lot of iterations, discussions and long meetings, we came up with our final ideal design process which we divided into 10 days.
Day 1- Monday (Introduction to Problem)
We start off our sprint by first understanding the basic user problem with the stakeholders (primarily the Product Manager). The problem statement is written in a certain format which goes as follows-
As a user, I need to (user need) __________ In order to (elements of value) __________ And currently cannot (pain points) ____________.
For example, if we are willing to help users find better cars on a platform, the problem statement may go like
As a user, I need to find an appropriate set of cars for myself in order to save time, and reduce efforts currently can not because there is no way to categorise, filter or sort the cars on any certain parameter.
You can learn more about writing a problem statement here.
Along with getting a concise problem statement, we try to understand the effort estimation and also the KPIs (Success Metrics) are decided.
Day 2- Tuesday (Deep Dive into the problem)
Once we understand the basic problem statement, we start to dig deeper into the problem statement to understand it further. One of the best ways we use to dig deeper into the problem is the 5 why’s.
Once we have the major problems identified along with other stakeholders, we move forward to writing the How Might We’s. HMWs basically help us in drilling down to the major statements or you can say the filtered version of all the efforts we have put in to understand the problem. If you wish to understand more about HMWs, refer to this.
Day 3- Wednesday (Ideating for probable solutions)
Once we have our HMWs, we have converged finally on our problem understanding phase. Now is the time to diverge in the ideation phase. This is where the methods like Crazy 8s or the Worst Idea technique come into play. Looking to learn some great techniques to get the most ideas in small time? Have a look at this article.
Along with the crazy ideas we get, we also do the basic competitors benchmarking to understand how our competitor or any other platform is solving the same or a similar problem (if any).
Once we have all the crazy ideas with us, it is time to finalise the idea which would work the best for us. This is where noting down the pros and cons of the ideas in one place and choose the best ideas to implement.
Day 4- Thursday ( Finalising solution/s)
Now we discuss all the pros and cons of the ideas we have and discuss them with the other stakeholders (generally PMs). After a rigorous discussion, we come down to one or two solutions. Once we are there, it is time to build basic wireframes of the solutions. You can start building the user flows and then the low-fidelity designs. The idea is to get a basic layout and first thought user flow done in this step.
Day 5- Friday (User flows, Wireframing and Testing)
Once we have our wireframes or the low-fidelity design with us, it is a good idea to build a prototype of the same. Testing the design here is very important because it gives us confidence and lets us know if we are even going in the right direction.
Many designers or product teams believe in testing only the high fidelity designs with the users to get the right feedback but when they do, they get to understand that the very basic solution they had created was not correct. On top of that, they wasted a couple of days refining the UI. Refining the UI of a solution that didn’t even solve the problem. Want to read more about low-fidelity design testing? Refer this.
https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/wireframes-prototype-testing/
Once you have the insights from the first 4–5 users, you can discuss the feedback with your PMs and incorporate the changes, if there are any, into the solution.
Now is also the time to include the UX writing team here if you have your basic structure of the idea ready.
Day 6- Monday (Iteration for UI)
After discussing the feedback and the final changes in the low-fidelity design, you have one whole day to try out different iterations of your design. Here you are free to try out as many iterations as possible.
Want to learn more about design iterations? Have a look at this great video.
We have our own Design System Chassis that we refer to when we are working on building UI designs.
Meanwhile, you are working on the UI, the content team has a good amount of time to finalise the copy. You can go forward with the dummy text.
Day 7- Tuesday (Feedback from fellows)
This is the day that you have to incorporate the copy with the final UI and discuss it with your fellows to get their feedback as well. You can use this as a buffer day as well if you went slow on any particular day in this sprint.
The fellows can be incorporated in the discussion process on Day 4 as well if you feel that a second opinion is required.
Day 8- Wednesday (Prototyping and Testing)
Once you have your final UI ready, now is the time to weave it into a good prototype including almost all the edge cases that you have thought of till now. Figma is a very good tool to make your prototypes. However, if you need it, there are other tools as well. For example, if you want to include sound effects as well, Adobe XD comes in help there. For good animation transitions, Framer can also be used.
Once you have a fool-proof prototype ready, now is the time to test it. 5 is a good number of users to test your design with. If you want to know more about User Testing, refer to the article that follows.
Day 9- Thursday (Incorporating user feedback)
After testing, you get a list of feedback from your users. The time is to discuss those with fellow product stakeholders and incorporate those into your design and prototype. It is good to think about all the feedback and analyse those to understand how your design is going to impact the user.
Day 10- Friday (Tech Grooming and Design Delivery)
Since you have everything ready on your Figma, it is time to create a document, small presentation or a deliverable Figma board. This is important because now you need to communicate all the important things to Tech Team now.
Building a flow and putting all the necessary note points on the top is the best practice. Components and their states, colour codes and typography should also be communicated properly
That’s all folks
The time duration of your sprint and the design tasks to be taken up in a sprint may vary from team to team or company to company, but a streamlined process of first opening up and analysing the problem statement properly and thinking about all possible solutions and testing it at all the necessary stages is important.
Above is just a process that we follow, any team can tweak it according to their needs. Another important thing here is that we do not always follow this process strictly day by day. Some tasks often go from one to another but the steps we follow remain the same.
Post-Credits Scene
After rigorous discussions, meetings, activities and spending a few weeks, our design team came up with this design process which sat perfectly with our work. The credit goes to
Design Head- Harshit Sinha
Senior Designers- Alok Edasseri and Zuberan Ahmed
Design Team- Aarju Yadav, Abhishek Kanthed, Ananya Gupta, Asir David, Cyril Varghese, Kshitij Kumar, Gurpreet Kaur, Jaie Karve, Nishanth Prabhu, Naveen Yellamelli, Priyal Singhal, Rakshita Anand, Shashank Deshpande, Vaibhav Verma.
