Building design culture around a shared set of values
Our design principles at ezCater
A design culture is a set of values that a designer, or a design team, can count on to guide processes and decisions. At ezCater, our team has a design culture that we live by each day. Defining these values allows us to maintain a process that isn’t too formal. For every project, our process is slightly different. However, we can feel confident in our work as long as we’re maintaining the following four values:
Make design decisions based on data
Data is our source of truth here at ezCater — experimental evidence, analytics, and research inform our designs at every turn.
Our data comes from many sources: analytics on how users move around our site, conversion rates, A/B testing results, user research insights, and feedback from our customer service team, to name a few. Analytics tells us what is and isn’t working, and talking to our users gives us insight as to “why.”
In the end, this body of data tells us what will have the biggest impact on our business’ annual goals, if our designs are successful at improving conversions, and where to focus improvements to customer experience.
Ship often and learn quickly
Sometimes, as designers, it’s easy to get carried away with making mockups pixel-perfect. We want things to look good and function perfectly. At ezCater, we value high quality, but we prioritize learning quickly. We don’t want to spend weeks perfecting a design only to find out that it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — we need to know that our solution will have a big impact.
When do we know when a design is “good enough” to put out to the world? We evaluate it to ensure we’re not compromising certain principles: make sure the solution is addressing the business goal, ensure that the new design is usable, and that it holds up the high standards of our brand. Once we’ve accomplished these principles, we’re ready to ship and measure.
We balance high quality with speed by iterating on designs quickly, progressing to higher levels of polish:
- We start by sketching with pencil and paper to narrow down ideas quickly
- We use tools like Invision to build prototypes rapidly and gain user feedback early
- We stay in constant communication with developers throughout implementation to add the finishing touches as they work.
Gather knowledge from internal stakeholders
While our team drives design at ezCater, we recognize that every other department in the company has expertise in areas that affect our work.
Our engineering team knows all the use cases (even ones hidden deep in the code), what ideas are feasible, and how much time designs will take to build. Our customer service team has a deep understanding of our customers by getting the most frequent, first-hand accounts of their pain-points. Our caterer sales team holds knowledge about the needs of our caterers and the struggles of owning a catering business.
We talk to these teams frequently — their knowledge adds to the body of data points guiding how we design.
Don’t be afraid of failure
Since we put our designs under test so often, we’re exposed to failure a lot — sometimes our designs don’t win. In a different environment, it could be easy to get caught up in a fear of failure, wondering “Will my redesign lose the A/B test? If it does, was it worth trying at all?” However, at ezCater, we know that if we don’t try different ideas and take risks, we won’t learn quickly.
We don’t view failure of designs as a personal failure or a waste of time. Rather, we recognize the value of learning and move on to the next solution.
Building design culture around a shared set of values gives you the freedom to tailor your process to the project you are working on, while maintaining the design principles that will make your product successful. Rather than defining a strict set of rules, we constantly refer back to our design culture recipe — our team stays true to its values and our product keeps moving forward.
Interested in joining our team? Check out our open Product and Design jobs at ezCater!
