<![CDATA[Stories by Andrew Zallie on Medium]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/150/150/1*ooqc6N_5AwefwWSUsYWRoQ.jpeg Stories by Andrew Zallie on Medium https://medium.com/@andrewzallie?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 Medium Tue, 19 May 2026 08:48:35 GMT <![CDATA[A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Five — Design Toolkit]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/a-short-handbook-on-digital-product-design-chapter-five-design-toolkit-502a415d97d?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/502a415d97d Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:03:29 GMT 2020-06-27T22:40:11.482Z

A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Five — Design Toolkit

If you have stumbled upon this post, you should know that this is the fifth and final chapter in a short handbook on digital product design. If you missed the previous chapters, they are linked below.

Table of Contents

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” ― Marshall McLuhan

Chapter Five: Design Toolkit

In Chapter Four, we discussed how you could use the design process to solve a functional problem with a formal solution. We reviewed each of the following phases in detail:

  • Discover (Strategy and Research)
  • Define (Synthesize)
  • Develop (Ideate and Evaluate)
  • Deliver (Prototype and Iterate)

In each phase of the Design Process, we looked at a few common methods a designer can use to accomplish his or her objectives. At the end of each phase, I listed a set of outputs or what you would expect to create during each phase. In this final chapter, I will provide you with a set of tools that will allow you to create those outputs and make the entire design process easier and more collaborative.

By now, you know that the design process is messy. There is a vast difference between the four-phase design process described in this handbook and how the design process works in practice or the real world.

Richard Banfield makes this point in one brilliant tweet.

Image Credit: Richard Banfield
Image Credit: Richard Banfield

To help us manage this messy reality, modern design tools have evolved into dynamic and collaborative platforms that can manage the entire design process.

My goal in this chapter is to provide you with a list of tools and resources that will allow you to start designing digital products immediately. Sticking with the theme of simple, I have organized the tools by various functions of a product design process or workflow. However, many of today’s modern tools and products perform multiple functions and are platforms that have extensive capabilities. I have listed a few tools in more than one place.

I am not going to review or go into detail describing how these different tools work. I am simply going to provide a list and let you explore each one on your own. I will highlight my favorite tools, but I am not endorsing one tool or product over another.

In addition to the list of tools, I have also collected several books and educational resources that I have found helpful along my journey in Product Design. If you have any recommendations or aren’t seeing a tool or resource that should be listed, drop me a note.

You can quickly find a tool or resource in this chapter by searching:

  • Research
  • User Flows & Site Maps
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • Design
  • Animation
  • User Testing
  • Design Systems
  • Handoff
  • Monitoring & Analytics
  • Sketch Plugins & UI Kits
  • Books on Design

💥 = Personal Favorite

Research

Typeform💥

Beautifully designed conversational forms and surveys.

Typeform: People-Friendly Forms and Surveys

Wufoo

Build and share online forms, collect data and payments, and automate your workflows.

Online Form Builder with Cloud Storage Database | Wufoo

SurveyMonkey

The one-stop-shop for all surveys.

SurveyMonkey: The World's Most Popular Free Online Survey Tool

Optimal Workshop

A user research platform that helps you and your team make decisions with confidence. Handles recruitment and analysis.

User Experience (UX) Research Platform | Optimal Workshop

Ethino

Complete research platform. Find real people for user research (in-person, remote UX, online, surveys, and panels).

All-in-one participant management for UX research

Organization & Ideation

Mural💥

Think and collaborate visually in a digital workspace.

Work better together with Mural's visual work platform | Mural

Milanote💥

An easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards.

Milanote - the tool for organizing creative projects

MindMeister

An online mind mapping tool that lets you capture, develop and share ideas visually.

MindMeister | Online Mind Mapping & Brainstorming Software

Coggle

A very simple tool to create and share mindmaps and flow charts.

Coggle - Simple Collaborative Mind Maps

XMind

A full-featured mind mapping and brainstorming tool, designed to generate ideas, inspire creativity, and bring you efficiency both in work and life.

XMind - Full-featured mind mapping and brainstorming tool.

Boords

The online storyboarding app for creative professionals. Create storyboards and gather feedback all in one place.

The Online Storyboard Creator App | Boords

User Flows & Site Maps

Lucid Chart💥

A visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration. Great for user flow diagrams and customer journeys.

Intelligent Diagramming | Lucidchart

Whimsical💥

A visual workplace to communicate ideas. (Wireframes, User Flows, Sticky Notes, Mind Maps)

Whimsical - The iterative workspace for product teams

FlowMapp

An online tool for creating visual Sitemaps and User Flows which helps you effectively design and plan User Experience.

FlowMapp - UX planning tool

MockFlow

A solution for planning UI/UX. Visualize user interfaces, create user flows, document styles and approve designs.

MockFlow - Wireframe Tools, Prototyping Tools, UI Mockups, UX Suite, Remote designing

Overflow

Turn your designs into playable user flow diagrams.

Overflow | User flows done right

Wireframing

Wireframe.cc💥

A very simple tool to quickly create wireframes.

Wireframe.cc | The go-to wireframing tool.

Balsamiq

One of the original wireframing tools.

Balsamiq. Rapid, Effective and Fun Wireframing Software | Balsamiq

HotGloo

A wireframe and prototyping tool designed to build wireframes for web, mobile and wearables.

Web & Mobile Wireframe, Prototyping (Web, iOS, Android) and UX Tool | HotGloo

Prototyping

InVision💥

A complete digital product design platform.

Collaborate better | InVision

Framer X💥

A rapid prototyping and design tool.

Framer: Create a professional website, free. No code website builder loved by designers.

Axure

Powerful prototyping and hand-off tool.

Axure RP - UX Prototypes, Specifications, and Diagrams in One Tool

Marvel POP

A tool that can turn any sketch or image into an interactive prototype.

POP by Marvel - Turn sketches into iOS and Android prototypes

Flinto

A simple tool to create interactive and animated prototypes.

Flinto - The App Design App

Proto.io

A design and prototype tool.

Proto.io - Prototyping for all

Design

Sketch💥

The digital design toolkit. Design, prototype, collaborate, and hand-off all in one platform.

Sketch · Design, prototype, collaborate and handoff

InVision💥

A complete digital product design platform.

The world's most powerful screen design tool

Framer X💥

A rapid prototyping and design tool.

Framer: Create a professional website, free. No code website builder loved by designers.

UX Pin

Design, prototype, and collaborate all in one platform.

UXPin | UI Design and Prototyping Tool

Oragami

Explore, iterate, and test your ideas. A new tool for designing modern interfaces.

Origami Studio - Origami Studio 3

Marvel

Wireframe, design, and prototype in an all-in-one design platform.

Marvel - The design platform for digital products. Get started for free.

Figma

Design, prototype, and collaborate all in the browse with this tool.

Figma: The Collaborative Interface Design Tool

Adobe XD

Wireframe, design, prototype, present, and share amazing experiences for web, mobile, voice — all in one app.

Adobe XD Learn & Support

Animation

Principle💥

An easy to use animation tool. Design animated and interactive user interfaces.

Principle

Hype

A keyframe-based animation system to bring your content to life.

Tumult Hype

User Testing

Lookback

Remote and in-person user testing platform.

Lookback

User Testing

A “Human Insight Platform” for user testing.

UserTesting Human Insight Platform | Customer Experience Insights

Helio.app

Get feedback and validate designs with an easy to use design testing platform.

Design Testing & Surveys

UsabilityHub

A remote user research platform that takes the guesswork out of design decisions by validating them with real users.

UsabilityHub | User Research & Usability Testing Platform

Design Systems

Pattern Lab💥

Build thoughtful, pattern-driven user interfaces using atomic design principles.

Create atomic design systems with Pattern Lab - Pattern Lab

Lingo💥

Visually organize all your assets in one place. Create and share living style guides, asset libraries and more.

Lingo - The visual home for your brand

InVision💥

A complete digital product design platform.

Experience a truly connected workflow with InVision Design System Manager

Handoff

Avocode💥

A platform-independent tool that helps teams turn Sketch, PSD, XD, AI, and Figma designs to the Web, React Native, iOS, or Android code.

Avocode App - Collaborate on Design Files with Anyone

Pattern Lab💥

Build thoughtful, pattern-driven user interfaces using atomic design principles

Create atomic design systems with Pattern Lab - Pattern Lab

Framer X

Visually render React, learn how to design advanced animations and import production components.

Framer - Development

Abstract

Version control for Sketch files + handoff.

Version control for Sketch | Abstract

Zeplin

Handoff designs and styleguides with accurate specs, assets, code snippets — automatically

Zeplin

Monitoring & Analytics

Qualaroo💥

Targeted user feedback across your products.

Homepage - Qualaroo | User Research & User Feedback Software

hotjar💥

A visual platform that helps you understand your users and make the right changes (heatmaps, recordings, user funnels, polls, and surveys).

Hotjar: Website Heatmaps & Behavior Analytics Tools

Usabilla

A platform that allows you to collect both qualitative and quantitative insights from your users to make the right optimization decisions.

Usabilla | Build Future-Proof Customer Experiences

Crazy Egg

Understand the customer journey with Snapshots, Heatmaps, and Recordings.

Crazy Egg Website - Optimization | Heatmaps & A/B Testing

Mix Panel

Analyze user behavior across your sites and apps.

Mixpanel: Product Analytics for Mobile, Web & More

Fullstory

A digital experience analytics platform.

Fullstory: Surface User Sentiment with Behavioral Data

Favorite Sketch Plugins & UI Kits

Because Sketch is such a big part of my design process, I couldn’t leave you without listing a few of my favorite plugins.

Sketch Runner

Perform Sketch actions quicker with your keyboard. Launch, search and execute. Designing becomes a breeze. (Spotlight of Sketch)

Runner Pro: The Sketch plugin to design faster

Icon Font

A plugin that helps you easily insert and manage icons from icon fonts.

keremciu/sketch-iconfont

Anima App

Create responsive and interactive high-fidelity prototypes, all inside Sketch.

Anima: the UX Design Agent

Craft

Easily sync your Sketch designs to InVision.

Craft | InVision

Bootsketch

Start your Sketch project with 200+ Bootstrap components.

Bootsketch: Sketch + Bootstrap

UX Power Tools

A design system UI kit for Sketch.

UX Power Tools - A Design System UI Kit for Sketch

Must-Read Books on Design

Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed this handbook on digital product design. If you have any feedback or would like to connect, my contact details are below.

Twitter

LinkedIn

Email

Follow me on Medium and Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked this short handbook on digital product design!

]]> <![CDATA[A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Four — Design Process]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/a-short-handbook-on-digital-product-design-chapter-four-design-process-632f4445793c?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/632f4445793c Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:02:39 GMT 2020-01-04T00:15:52.154Z

A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Four — Design Process

If you have stumbled upon this post, you should know that this is the fourth chapter in a short handbook on digital product design. If you missed the previous chapters, they are linked below.

Table of Contents

Chapter Four: What is a Design Process?

In chapter one of this handbook, we defined product design as a process to solve a functional problem with a formal solution, or the entire process toward a solution. In this chapter, we will discuss this process in detail.

While in practice, this process looks different for every designer or company, product designers do draw on a similar set of rules, methods, tests, and activities to solve problems and design solutions.

We discuss design as a process because it allows us to easily describe a creative mindset that is very ambiguous for many to follow. Processes are easy to understand because we work with them every day. A process is simply a well-defined set of steps and decision points for executing a specific task.

So what is a design process?

It is simply a series of steps that a product designer or design team follows to solve a functional problem with a formal solution.

By now, this should sound very familiar. Remember, the only widely accepted truth about design is that it is fundamentally about problem-solving.

Now, if someone asks you, “What is your design process?”, you can relax and know that all they want to understand is how you think and communicate your creative approach to solving a problem with a formal solution.

Process Scope

I recognize that the scope of work that falls under a product designer’s responsibility can vary depending on the business context. For instance, in some organizations, a product designer might be heavily involved in the upfront problem definition by doing design research or working as a strategist, wherein at other companies, this might be handled strictly by product management or marketing.

In this handbook, we are going to keep it simple. We will take a look at a general and easy to follow a design process that you can implement in any project or at any organization. The design process is used when testing new product ideas, validating new features on existing products, and improving existing product experiences. My goal with this chapter is to define the common phases and steps in a typical design process.

But before we jump in and discuss the various phases and steps that make up a design process, I need to make one thing clear. A design process should never be thought of as a linear, step-by-step process that you follow to solve a problem and produce a solution. Yes, the word “process” is in the name. However, as we look at the phases and discuss the steps involved in each phase, keep in mind that you do not have to follow a particular sequence. A design process exists to help us organize our work, point us in the right direction, and learn quickly.

“A strong design process establishes a shared vocabulary and sets clear expectations to course correct early and often” [11]

For a great example of how a design process works in the real world, check out Buzzfeed’s design process.

The Design Process

There are many adaptations in the design process. It would be impossible for me to provide a universal process that would cover everything you need to know about designing a product. However, with the phases below, I will cover a majority of the steps and activities required to solve a functional problem with a formal solution. If you have seen the Double Diamond Diagram from the British Design Council and Dan Nessler, these phases should look familiar.

At the end of this chapter, I will link to other examples that range in complexity and scope. I will also include a few great examples of processes that bridge Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile Development.

The general flow we will look at in detail is below:

  1. Discover (Strategy and Research)
  2. Define (Synthesize)
  3. Develop (Ideate and Evaluate)
  4. Deliver (Prototype and Iterate)

Phases of the Design Process

The design process is ultimately a lengthy activity of Divergent (Discover and Develop) and Convergent (Define and Deliver) thinking to find the right problem and identify the best solution. Throughout the steps and activities of each phase, a designer bounces back and forth between these two types of thinking. Divergent thinking requires you to consider the art of the possible as you discover and develop as many solutions as possible. Convergent thinking requires you to narrow down and define your problem in order to design your solution. Keep this in mind as we look at each phase. For more information on this type of thinking, check out this video by IDEO on innovation.

Discover (Strategy and Research)

The goal of the first phase is to discover as much data as you can about your initial problem, opportunity, or insight so that you can determine why your product needs to exist. You need to understand the problem you are trying to solve.

You start by planning and conducting both user and market research.

  • Market Research includes general trends, current customer expectations, competitive analysis, market size, and market growth rate.
  • User Research is gathered through interviews, surveys, focus groups, and contextual observation. The goal of user research is to understand how users currently perform tasks or jobs, their pain points, and potential opportunities.

This research needs to align with the organization’s overall strategy and vision. More often than not, business strategy and design research do significantly overlap. Therefore, one could argue that before you start discovery, you must gain business alignment. I would not disagree. For instance, you could add a phase zero to this design process in which you set and align the product vision and strategy with the organization’s goals. However, to keep this process simple, I include these activities in discovery. What is imperative is that every product has a vision and a strategy that ultimately aligns with the organization’s goals.

Example Outputs

Unstructured research findings, documentation, survey responses, interview transcripts, video observations, and general findings.

Books to Read on Research:

Articles and Guides:

Define (Synthesize)

Once you have completed your research, you need to make sense of the data you collected. This is a painstaking process that requires you to organize your findings in a way that will help you understand your user’s needs, wants, and desires.

Taking insights from the market and user research, your goal in this phase is to do two things:

  1. Determine whether you are solving the right problem
  2. Define the problem

To start, find a large space to lay out all of the research so that you can begin to build common themes from the findings. It helps to visualize your findings in a way that will allow you to identify user pain points and potential opportunity areas.

Yes, this is where Post-its come in handy.

Products start and end with your user’s pains and gains. It is important to not only understand these but also to define them accurately. Below are a few common methods and tools to help you get started.

Empathy Maps

An empathy map is a visual tool that helps you articulate what you know about a user’s behaviors and attitudes. It put’s you in the “head” of your user and allows you to build a better understanding of the “why” behind a user’s needs, wants, and desires. Instead of focusing on the product itself, empathy maps force us to focus on the people who use the product. Empathy maps often guide the construction of personas, which we will discuss next.

For more on what empathy maps are and how to use them:

User Personas

User personas are comprehensive profiles of a real user or your ideal customer. A persona is based on user research and defines the user’s needs, goals, frustrations, and behavior. User personas are not made up. They are created by talking with real people and analyzing real data.

Image Credit: Ofer Ariel

For more on what personas are and how to use them:

Job Stories

Job Stories help us narrow our focus and get descriptive. We use Job Stories to document a problem without being overly prescriptive about the solution. I mentioned identifying “jobs” briefly during the discover phase of the design process. The concept of the jobs-to-be-done framework if simple.

“A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.” [12]

So how do you start documenting Job Stories?

  1. Start with real people (Job Stories come from interviews)
  2. Understand what they are trying actually to accomplish
  3. Forget about solutions, focus on motivation
Image Credit: Intercom

For more on how to write Job Stories:

How Might We (HMW) Questions

Preparing “How Might We” questions is another activity that will help us better define our problem and prepare for the next phase. Once you identified your problem areas and pain points, you can reframe your insight statements into “How Might We” (HMW) questions and turn the user challenges into opportunities. An HMW question doesn’t define a solution, but rather it provides the right frame of mind to ideate a solution.

For more on HMW and some examples:

Example Outputs

Research brief, user personas, user flows, and HMW questions.

Develop (Ideate and Evaluate)

The develop phase is primarily focused on two main activities:

  1. Ideation — brainstorm and generate as many creative solutions as possible
  2. Evaluation — determine what ideas or solutions are worth exploring

With the personas, jobs, and HMW questions in hand, we diverge and open up to all possibilities or solutions. Below are a few methods and tools to help us communicate our ideas and evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a great method of communicating ideas through visual stories and showcasing how your idea fits into your user’s lives. A storyboard represents a visual scenario similar to a comic and helps us as designers understand how a user could interact with a solution in real life.

Image Credit: uxstudio

When storyboarding, avoid getting caught up in the details of the solution. Rather, focus on what your persona is trying to achieve (i.e., goals).

For more information on Storyboards and how to use them in the design process, check out:

Customer Journeys

There are many definitions and variations of a customer journey, but the definition I align with the most is by Megan Grocki at Mad*Pow. [13]

“A Customer Journey Map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels.”
— Megan Grocki
Image Credit: Mad*Pow

In the design process, customer journeys help us empathize with users and identify important opportunities that directly affect the experience.

Customer journeys can follow many different formats, but at a high level, a journey represents different phases or steps a customer goes through to accomplish a goal. The three most common phases are before, during, and after the usage of a product or interaction with a service.

A customer journey must include the following:

  • Personas: the main user along, with their pain points, goals, thoughts, and feelings.
  • Timeline: phases (before, during, after) or a specific amount of time (one year).
  • Touchpoints: customer interactions with the organization or product.
  • Emotion: what the user is feeling at the time of the interaction (frustration, happiness, anxiety, etc.)
  • Channels: the context of the interaction (website, mobile app, physical store).

Remember, no two customer journeys are alike in format. When creating a customer journey, spend less time debating the format, and more time debating what you are trying to communicate. We create customer journeys so that we keep the customer at the forefront of our design decisions.

One final comment on the customer journey before we move on. Customer journeys are typically used in one of two ways. Either to develop a current state view so that you can define a problem, or as a future state visioning tool to highlight pain points and uncover opportunities. I could have also listed the customer journey in the define phase of the design process but chose to list it only once in an effort to keep it simple.

For more information on Customer Journeys:

Sketching

Image Credit: HubSpot

The quickest and easiest way to visualize an idea is to grab a pen and paper and draw. Before I pull up any visual design software, I first start by sketching my ideas on paper. It is fast and you can compare a broad range of potential solutions without getting sucked into the visual design or aesthetic of the solution. Remember, this phase is all about ideation and generating as many ideas as possible.

Wireframing

Wireframes extend your sketches and are great for getting quick feedback on ideas. The wireframe serves as a visual guide that represents a page’s structure, hierarchy, and key elements or patterns.

Like sketching, wireframes are easy to create and are not meant to be permanent or final. As you gather more information during the design process, wireframes evolve. When wireframing, there is no need to spend time on the details like colors or copy. Your goal with a wireframe is to gather feedback on the functionality and user experience rather than the aesthetic.

In addition to feedback, wireframes serve as a common language between designers, developers, and users, which makes them extremely useful for discussing ideas.

Wireframes are the bridge between your sketches and a prototype. We will discuss prototyping in the next phase of the design process.

For more information about Wireframing:

Evaluate

At this point in the process, you have talked to users, defined their problems, and brainstormed solutions. But how do you know which ideas are the best ideas? How do you know where to start?

You start by getting additional feedback. Take your sketches and wireframes and get them in front of users. You have made some assumptions during the ideation process, and you need to test those assumptions by getting feedback from your users.

I mentioned earlier that the design process is not a linear process to be followed step-by-step. This is a critical point that I will continue to make. In reality, you should be creating, testing, learning, and iterating throughout the entire design process. However, after you have come up with your initial ideas or potential solutions, you need to have a clear understanding and direction of where to go and what to design.

In this linear design process, this is where the lines between phases begin to blur. In the develop phase, we will take the best ideas and make them tangible. By the end of this phase, we need to know where to start. To know where to start, we must test our initial designs and get feedback from real users.

Essentially, you need your users to answer two very important questions at this point in the design process:

  1. Would this product solve your problem?
  2. If it does, is it being designed the right way?

This testing process of testing does not need to be complex. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of time and resources. Start small by getting your sketches or wireframes in front of no more than five users. [14]

“The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.”
— The Nielson Norman Group
Image Credit: Nielsen

With your sketches or wireframes in hand, you will want to focus your initial testing on user flows, navigation, layout, and content information or hierarchy. How detailed you want to be is up to you, but you will want to ask your users for their feedback and opinions.

Once the initial direction is established, we can take our preliminary sketches and wireframes and turn them into interactive prototypes. We will discuss prototyping and iteration in the next phase.

Example Outputs

A set of ideas, customer journeys, storyboards, sketches, wireframes, a future vision, and first prototypes.

Deliver (Prototype and Iterate)

Once we have an initial direction for the product and a clear understanding of what we want to design, we will begin to create our formal solution.

In this final phase, we borrow heavily from the principles of Design Thinking, which requires us to take an iterative approach toward problem-solving by running experiments and rapidly iterating. We turn our stories, flows, and wireframes into interactive prototypes that are iterated upon until we have met our defined objectives and have a solution. To test our hypothesis, we follow a simple process — prototype, test, refine, and repeat.

Prototype

The purpose of prototyping is to create something tangible that your users can interact with, giving them an idea of how the product could be used to solve their problem or accomplish a task. Prototyping allows you to test your idea with real people before building the full solution.

Turning your wireframes into an interactive prototype will allow your users to understand your product better and give you more prescriptive feedback. As a designer, the process of prototyping often sparks new and different ideas that you would not have thought of if you had just created static wireframes.

As far as the fidelity of the prototype, this is completely up to you based on your problem and context. You can create a low-fidelity prototype using a pencil and paper or a high-fidelity prototype using a platform like InVision. What is important is that you remain efficient and avoid long feedback loops.

“The fidelity of your prototype should match a fidelity of your thinking.”
— Nick Babich

Again, the goal of prototyping is to get feedback quickly so that you can iterate on your product.

Test

We discussed user testing in the previous section, but we are going to build on it here. Testing is an important activity that should take place across the entire design process. When you are building a product for users, it is important to return to your users for feedback continually. Otherwise, you are building something no one will want. Putting your prototype in the hands of your users and gathering feedback will help you understand what works and what does not work.

As we have talked about, user testing does not need to be complex. Simple usability testing with representative users will give us the qualitative data we need to make important design decisions while determining the user’s satisfaction with the solution.

Usability testing can be done in one of two ways, formally or informally. Formal usability testing requires a researcher to set up an environment where the users can perform the testing activities. Typically, formal usability testing requires you to pay or incentivize (gift cards, coffee, etc.) your users to get them to show up.

Informally, you can “get out of the building” as Steve Blank famously coined and find your users where they are and ask them to play with your prototype. This may look like going to a local coffee shop or a place you know that your user frequents.

Regardless of how testing is done, it is fundamental to the design process. Below, we will look at a few tips that will help get you started.

Define your objectives

Before you start testing, ask yourself what do you want to achieve by testing your prototype. What are you trying to learn? What are the specific aspects of the prototype you want feedback on? Are there certain flows or features you want to test?

Before you can put together questions or user tasks, you first need to define your objectives.

A few examples:

  • Identify any missing features or nice-to-haves
  • Determine if the navigation is easy to understand
  • Identify how long it takes to complete a task
  • Identify functionality that is not apparent to the user
  • Determine if the solution meets the user’s expectations

Identify the right users

Finding the right users to test is critical. These users should be people that would use your product. This does not mean that you discount other stakeholder feedback, but for purposes of usability testing, you must get your product in the hands of your target audience.

Based on your user research (personas, empathy maps, etc.), you should have a good idea of your target users. Finding real people is not easy, but as we discussed earlier, we do not need a lot of people to perform usability testing. You should focus on quality over quantity. Testing with five users will uncover nearly all core usability problems. A fresh pair of eyes will go a long way.

Because finding the right people is often difficult, start recruiting early in the design process. During the Discover Phase, identify people that would be willing to test your prototype so that you are not trying to find people later.

Ask the right questions and prepare actionable tasks

“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. “
— Steve Jobs

People are complex beings whose thoughts and opinions are often influenced by bias, completely irrational, or unintelligible. This is why Steve Job’s quote is often used as an excuse not to do user research or testing.

While I agree with Jobs, I do think his quote is often misinterpreted. You can not just ask users what they want. Users or customers do not always know how to articulate their needs, wants, and desires actually are. It is the job of the designer to create the proper structure that informs and guides the user during the testing process to ensure a quality outcome for both parties.

To get started, follow this simple structure to get the most out of user testing:

(1) Provide users with a scenario or a specific task based on your objectives

Rather than giving your users step-by-step instructions, give them a scenario and they will perform more naturally. You still need to make sure that the users will know what to do. When designing scenarios or tasks make them realistic and actionable.

As the designer, make sure you have a clear goal for each task. For example, “I expect that users will be able to navigate to the profile page in two clicks.”

(2) Ask users specific questions in which you need answers

Do not ask vague or ambiguous questions. Be prescriptive and ask questions that will lead to valuable insights instead of subjective responses. For instance, instead of asking, “Was the app easy to navigate?” you should ask, “What specifically made the app easy to navigate?”.

(3) Open the floor for general feedback

Only asking for general feedback is not helpful, but opening up the floor and listening to users’ thoughts and opinions about your product could uncover hidden insights that you may miss if you only ask specific questions or have users perform tasks. Give users time to think and provide their opinion, do not interrupt them. Silence is ok.

(4) Analyze and organize your findings

Earlier in the design process, we had to organize and synthesize our findings from user research. With usability testing, we follow a similar process, which is why it is important to have a good system in place to quickly record, organize, and synthesize our user feedback.

If you are holding a formal usability test and recording your users visually, make sure you keep all of your files in a centralized place. If you can, mark any notable times during the recording process so that you can go back and review the video after the test. Once you complete a testing session, immediately go back and read through all of your feedback, written and recorded. This way, it remains fresh and will allow you to organize your findings better. In the final section of this handbook, I have listed a few tools that will level up your user testing abilities.

For more reading on user testing:

Refine

The design process is iterative. It follows the assumption that we do not get everything right the first time. The process of prototyping and testing reveals our wrong assumptions and undocumented decisions. As a product designer, you need to determine what part of the product needs to be refined or clarified based on the feedback from your users. This feedback should either be ignored, discussed further with your users, or actioned. The list of actions will form the scope of work for the next design iteration.

Repeat

Continuous improvement is critical to the success of your product. Iterative design requires us to constantly refine and improve the product based on both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Most products go through multiple rounds of iteration. If you started with a low-fidelity prototype, you may move toward a design that more closely resembles what the end product could look like. This, of course, brings a new set of challenges as you start to develop a more mature product. Remember, the fidelity of your prototype should match a fidelity of your thinking. Meaning, where you are at with the design will determine what type of feedback you are looking for during user testing. This iterative process of design provides a great opportunity for product designers to improve the products they design and ultimately make them more valuable for their end-users.

Production

Designing a great user interface starts by following a great design process. As you continue to refine your prototype based on user feedback, the fidelity of your product will increase. We know that product design is about solving a functional problem with a formal solution and not about designing a fancy interface. However, I cannot end the design process without mentioning user interface design.

Once you have defined your product’s scope and features, you need to develop a design language and establish the emotional characteristics of your product. I am talking about how your product actually interfaces with real people.

Modern design tools and the adoption of design systems have allowed for user interface design to be integrated into the prototyping process itself. Your prototype will naturally increase in fidelity after every feedback loop. By leveraging patterns and components from your design system, you can quickly spin up prototypes that maintain the product or company’s look and feel.

If you are building a new product, there are many UI design kits and systems publically available to help you get started. In the Design Toolkit chapter of this handbook, I have listed a few of my favorites.

With that said, UI Design is an art and a skill set that takes practice. Understanding how to use visual hierarchy, color, and typography to create a product that not only solves a problem but also delights the end-user only comes with time.

In this handbook, I will not be diving into the specifics behind how to design great user interfaces, but I will share a few resources that I have found helpful.

For more information about UI design:

People to Follow

That is a wrap for this chapter. We have covered a lot of ground, and I hope that you have found this chapter and entire handbook helpful wherever you are along your product design journey. If you have read this far, you should have enough information to jumpstart your learning on product design. I will finish this chapter by mentioning a few people that I have found extremely helpful over the years. Go follow them.

Many of these people I have referenced or included articles they have written throughout the handbook. This list is by no means exhaustive, but the writing of these industry and thought leaders have greatly informed how I think about and practice product design.

Additional recommended reading on Design Process:

Continue to Chapter Five: Design Toolkit →

Follow me on Medium and Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked this short handbook on digital product design!

[11] “Introducing BuzzFeed’s Design Process — BuzzFeed Design — Medium.” 3 Aug. 2016, https://medium.com/buzzfeed-design/introducing-buzzfeeds-design-process-4fefbdcd83ea.

[12] “What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)? — Jobs to be Done.” https://jtbd.info/2-what-is-jobs-to-be-done-jtbd-796b82081cca.

[13] “How to Create a Customer Journey Map — UX Mastery.” 16 Sep. 2014, https://uxmastery.com/how-to-create-a-customer-journey-map/.

[14] “Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.” 18 Mar. 2000, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/.

]]> <![CDATA[A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Three — Design Thinking]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/a-short-handbook-on-digital-product-design-chapter-three-design-thinking-aeeb40a236e1?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/aeeb40a236e1 Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:01:35 GMT 2020-01-04T00:14:37.450Z

A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Three — Design Thinking

If you have stumbled upon this post, you should know that this is the third chapter in a short handbook on digital product design. If you missed the previous chapters, they are linked below.

Table of Contents

I can not go much further in this handbook without discussing Design Thinking and its role in product design. While there is a lot to unpack in Design Thinking, I will give you a short overview of what it is and how it relates to product design.

Chapter Three: What is Design Thinking?

Tim Brown gives the most commonly used definition of Design Thinking. He states that…

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” [10]

Another definition that deserves mentioning is Elijah Woolery, Director of Design Education at InVision. He describes Design Thinking as…

“More than a methodology or framework, design thinking combines the problem-solving roots of design with deep empathy for the user.”

So whether Design Thinking is an approach or more than a methodology, we can agree that Design Thinking is fundamentally about putting the user's needs first when developing products, experiences, and services.

This is not to say that the business’s needs and technical needs are not considered. Both viability (business) and feasibility (technology) are part of design thinking as shown below.

Image credit: Standford d.school

However, when you are implementing design thinking as a process, you always start from the desirability of the customer or user. What are their needs, wants, and desires? What are their pain points and how can we address them with a solution?

This differs from the traditional business-first mindset, which is typically driven by a definitive problem-solving approach that relies on proof.

Image credit: Adobe

Design Thinking takes an iterative approach built on trial and error. Luke Wroblewski’s post A Difference of Design explains this beautifully.

In summary, Design Thinking recognizes that there are different approaches to solving problems. Organizations are made up of individuals who share different sets of expertise and views of the world, but one thing everyone can agree on is the humans that inspire the work.

Design Thinking and Product Design

A product designer, who empathizes and understands people’s needs, increases the probability that their solution will be a success. Image credit: Standford d.school

The principles and methodologies of Design Thinking heavily influence a product designer. Taking an iterative approach toward problem-solving, identifying critical questions by focusing on the user’s needs, and rapid prototyping are common across Design Thinking and product design as a process.

When thinking about our product, we need to start with the following questions:

  1. What is the problem?
  2. Who has this problem?
  3. What are we trying to achieve with our solution?

Design Thinking helps us answer these questions by allowing us to empathize with the user and turn our attention to the experience of the product as a whole, not just the look and feel aspect of design.

In the design process, the product designer uses Design Thinking to build an understanding of the problem and validate prototyped solutions with potential users.

A product designer well versed in Design Thinking always do the following:

  • Take a human-centered approach toward developing products and services that users love, and the business’s bottom lines love even more.
  • Follow an iterative approach toward problem-solving by running experiments and rapidly iterating.
  • Take a multidisciplinary approach to consider the opportunities and constraints of desirability, feasibility, and viability.
  • Lead with empathy while interacting with and understanding their users.
  • Educate others on how to be a Design Thinker.

For additional information on Design Thinking, the Design Management Institute provides a good overview on their website. In the next chapter, we will discuss the design process, what it is, and how you can develop your own.

Continue to Chapter Four: Design Process →

Follow me on Medium and Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked this short handbook on digital product design!

[10] IDEO Design Thinking.” https://designthinking.ideo.com/.

]]> <![CDATA[A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Two — Good Design]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/a-short-handbook-on-digital-product-design-chapter-two-good-design-2ad0105267bb?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/2ad0105267bb Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:47 GMT 2020-01-04T00:12:02.349Z

A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter Two — Good Design

If you have stumbled upon this post, you should know that this is the second chapter in a short handbook on digital product design. If you missed the previous chapters, they are linked below.

Table of Contents

In the first chapter, I introduced you to the topic of product design, what it is, and how it relates to building digital products. In this chapter, I aim to answer why good design is important by taking a look at a few fundamental principles that all product designers should understand before they start.

Chapter Two: What is Good Design?

Yes, there is a big difference between good design and bad design. If you are jumping around and did not read the first section, let me give you a quick refresh on the definition of design.

Design is a method of problem-solving. It is less about aesthetics and more about function.

To get a taste for good design, we will take a look at a few principles along with examples in both digital and physical product design. I am barely scratching the surface. However, these examples are an excellent place to start.

If you like to read lists, check out these principles of good design:

Good Design is Frictionless

“A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.”
— Herbert A. Simon

Friction is anything that gets in the way of a person reading or using something. The more friction, the harder it is for the user to accomplish the goal behind a design.

Bad Design — Hard to read text, information overload, not digestible.

Good Design — Simple, good use of visuals, and color.

Jared Spool on Twitter

Great design, when done well, is invisible. If the user notices the design, it's not good enough yet.

For digital products, sometimes friction is needed and can be used to improve the user’s overall experience. Read Designing Friction For A Better User Experience to learn how to leverage friction in your design.

Good Design is Intuitive

“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious,”
— Steve Jobs

Bad Design — This can be confusing. Handles are meant to be pulled.

Good Design — This is intuitive, a bar is made to be pushed.

For how to create an intuitive design, check out this great guide, How to Create an Intuitive Design.

Good Design is Simple

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
— Leonardo da Vinci

Bad Design — This is an example of charting software used in hospitals. It is visually complex and constrained to a large desktop that does not follow the nurse or care provider.

This screen has a sad story behind it (How Bad UX Killed Jenny). Ultimately, poor design can have tragic consequences. As product designers, we must not settle for bad design.

Good Design — Not only is this example visually more appealing and less complex, but it is also functional. Charting software that is designed for an iPad gives mobility to the nurse or provider caring for the patient.

Good Design Stands the Test of Time

“It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.”
— Dieter Rams

When I think of a design that stands the test of time, my mind goes immediately to Craigslist.

Yes, it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing design, but it sure does work well. Craigslist, which has been around for nearly 20 years, gets 50 billion page views per month. [6]

With stats like those, I would say Craigslist is meeting the needs of its users pretty well. You do not always have to have a fancy UI maintain good design.

Good Design Inspires

“With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go,”
— Steve Jobs in the first iPod press release.

The iPod may not have been the first portable music play, but it sure is the one everyone remembers (sorry Walkman).

It is a cultural icon. Its minimalistic white design and its simplicity inspired a generation of products that have gone on to change how we interact with machines. For a fun look back at the iPod’s cultural impact Cult of Mac did a great writeup for its tenth anniversary: An illustrated history of the iPod and its massive impact.

For a fun reminder of design that fails to inspire, remember the Zune?

Check out this great list of all the design inspiration you will ever need.

Good Design is Functional and Beautiful

Balancing functionality and beauty is not an easy task.

Since this is a handbook on digital product design, we should take a look at a few examples of products that are visually beautiful and solve real problems.

Below are a few examples of digital products or services that do a great job of balancing function and beauty. If you have others that should be on this shortlist, send them my way.

“Functional design enables people. Beauty signals respect and worth. To give people beautiful and functional design is to empower them. The gift of empowering others makes you a force of nature”.
— Stephanie Engle

I borrowed a few of these examples from Stephanie Engle’s excellent post on an Introduction to Product Design, which I highly recommend. It inspired me to write this handbook.

Do not just settle for good, want to be great? Read Jamal Nichols post on Great Design vs. Good Design.

Why is Good Design Important?

We have taken a look at just a few practices and principles that make up good design. The resources I shared should provide you with plenty of reading. In this next section, we will discuss the importance of design.

In many ways, what makes a good design is fairly intuitive. If something works well and helps you accomplish a goal, you recognize it as being a good design. Humans have a general intuition of good and bad design.

Design can be wonderful in our lives. It can inspire us, delight us, enable us, and change us. Design can also be a hindrance in our lives. It can divide us, feed addiction, mislead us, and it can even kill us.

Humans are subconsciously affected by design. Because of this, a designer carries a great responsibility for bringing a design into the world.

Lately, there has been much discussion on the ethics of design. This discussion is primarily due to the rise of technology, and the reach digital products have on society. A digital product designer can positively or negatively affect lives at scale.

Many of today’s digital products can meet the standards of good design, yet at the same time, capitalize on the cognitive vulnerabilities we all have as human beings.

In a 2016 study, research group DScout reported that ‘heavy users’ touch their smartphones 5,427 times a day. [7]

Tristan Harris, a self-proclaimed philosopher and ex-Google design ethicist, published an industry-wide wake-up call in a 144-page Google Slides presentation, “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.”

In it, he declared…

“Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies” — Google, Apple, and Facebook — “had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention … We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.” [8]

For a more detailed look into digital addiction, check out The Atlantic’s piece on Tristan titled The Binge Breaker.

Aaron Weyenberg, Director of Research and Development at TED, has a great piece titled The ethics of good design: A principle for the connected age that discusses good design and the power shift of control from the product user to the product designer.

On the topic of this power shift, he says this:

“Today, that kind of control is shifting away from a product’s user and toward its designer, by capitalizing on cognitive vulnerabilities we all have as human beings. It’s both perplexing and impressive to me how creators of such products have evaded scrutiny, let alone responsibility. For example, studies showing how many times we check our devices each day (75 to 150 depending on the study) are often followed by narratives using the language and tone of self-blame (addiction, narcissism, boredom, etc.). Those narratives are rarely accompanied by what’s happening on the other side of the product development cycle: The designer’s invisible hand meddling with the controls.”[9]

He goes on to argue that we reframe the principles of good design for the connected age and suggests an amendment to Ram’s principles of good design.

Here’s the amendment:

“11. Good design is ethical. The product places the user’s interest at the center of its purpose. Any effort to influence the user’s agency or behavior is in the spirit of their own positive wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those around them.”

You might be thinking: Well, who defines what is ethical? He does address this in the post; you can read it for yourself. You can also check out this quick primer for ethics in design.

The topic of ethics and its importance in design is well beyond any one person or this guide. You can spend a lifetime thinking, discussing, and debating decisions made by product designers and their impact. All I aim to do here is highlight the importance of this topic, and make you aware that as a product designer, you play a central role in safeguarding digital products, so they not only empower but also protect users

This is why design is extremely important.

If I can leave you with one thought, remember this:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
— Unknown

So…

“Question everything generally thought to be obvious.”
— Dieter Rams

On your team, in your company, in your city, let us keep the conversation going by asking the tough questions.

For more reading on this topic, I have listed a few great resources below.

It is not all negative:

Continue to Chapter Three: Design Thinking →

Follow me on Medium and Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked this short handbook on digital product design!

[6] “craigslist.org Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic — Alexa.” https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org. Accessed 2 Sep. 2019.

[7] “Putting a Finger on Our Phone Obsession — dscout.” https://blog.dscout.com/mobile-touches.

[8] “Google Deck on Digital Wellbeing ‘A Call to Minimize … — SlideShare.” 13 Aug. 2018, https://www.slideshare.net/paulsmarsden/google-deck-on-digital-wellbeing-a-call-to-minimize-distraction-and-respect-users-attention.

[9] “The ethics of good design: A principle for the connected age — Medium.” 20 Nov. 2016, https://medium.com/swlh/dieter-rams-ten-principles-for-good-design-the-1st-amendment-4e73111a18e4.

]]> <![CDATA[A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter One — Introduction]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/a-short-handbook-on-digital-product-design-chapter-one-introduction-82462c696484?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/82462c696484 Fri, 03 Jan 2020 23:59:08 GMT 2020-01-04T00:25:33.049Z

A Short Handbook On Digital Product Design: Chapter One — Introduction

Introduction

In 1971, designer and educator Victor Papanek wrote:

“All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the inherent value of design as the primary underlying matrix of life. . . . Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order.” [1]

Why am I writing this?

Over the last few years, I have worked at the forefront of scaling design in large enterprise organizations. Whether it has been leading the design of an eCommerce platform for a leading high-tech manufacturer or managing the re-design of the employee experience for a large publisher, I have learned firsthand how design is leveraged to not only improve the customer experience but also solve some tough business problems. At the same time, I have also worked with many startups (including one of my own) advising on product and design decisions.

To do this, you may think that I have a formal background in design.

I do not.

I have been fortunate enough to learn from some very talented people, and as a naturally curious person, I am primarily self-taught.

This short book was born out of my experiences over the last few years learning how to design and manage experience-led digital products. I am writing this to share my experiences and help others who, like myself, find themselves with a desire to create and solve problems with principles and practices that designers have been using for years.

In this handbook, I will be specifically discussing the practice of product design as it relates to building digital products. The Internet can be a very overwhelming and noisy place, but I hope that you will find this to be a helpful guide along your product design journey.

Who is this handbook for?

This handbook is for anyone without a strong background in design who is eager to learn how design principles and methodologies are used to solve problems and build digital products that meet human needs.

Whether you are a product manager who wishes to incorporate design principles into your product development process or a developer who is looking to take a more active role in the design process, this handbook should provide you with enough information to get started.

For those who are not as close to the product development process, this handbook can still be very useful in helping you understand how design and its principles can add tremendous value to any aspect of an organization that involves interaction with its customers or employees.

How do I read this handbook?

The handbook was built to be referenced rather than read as an actual book. Due to the sheer amount of content on the topic of design and digital product design, I have provided links to other articles, books, and guides I have found around the web that do a better job of describing a topic than I would ever do. I write not as an expert but as a guide who is sharing resources that I have found to be helpful along my journey.

I broke this handbook down into the chapters listed below. I have published each chapter of the handbook separately, which will allow you to jump to your topic of choice.

Chapter One: Intro to Product Design

In this chapter, I will be discussing the evolution of the product designer’s role in the product development lifecycle.

What is Design?

Design is a vast field of knowledge containing many divisions, sub-divisions, and disciplines across industries, each with their mental models and ways of working. Depending on whom you ask, you are almost always guaranteed to get a different definition of design.

This illustration demonstrates the many design industries, divisions, subdivisions, and disciplines very well. [2]

The growth of the software industry has led designers across multiple disciplines to move toward digital product design and bring with them a diverse range of viewpoints and experiences. With these different and sometimes conflicting backgrounds, many lines are beginning to blur across disciplines as new ones are created, and old ones merged.

Yet with all of this change, nearly all designers across disciplines have one thing in common: they use a similar high-level methodology to solve problems.

What is Product Design?

If we consider product design as a process or methodology, Paul DeVay says it best, “[Product design] is an imprecise, iterative process to solve a functional problem with a formal solution.” [3]

It is more than great UX or beautiful UI working together to create an attractive solution.

Product Design is the entire process toward a solution.

Tactically, this process toward a solution looks different depending on the organization or the individual. One common process popularized by the folks at Google Ventures is the Design Sprint. Design Sprints are used by some of today’s most well-known companies like Uber, Slack, and Blue Bottle Coffee. There are many adaptations in the design process. We will talk more about the process in the fourth chapter of this handbook.

Airbnb’s VP of Design Alex Schleifer has a great post called Defining Product Design that is a must-read.

What do Product Designers do?

To put it simply, a product designer identifies an opportunity for a new product in a customer’s life and brings it into existence. In the context of an existing product, they seek to improve the overall experience.

I love the description of a product designer given by eric eriksson, who has spent time as a product designer at Instagram, Facebook, and Shopify:

“If you look at your product designer as someone that makes your solution look presentable, look again. A product designer helps you identify, investigate, and validate the problem, and ultimately craft, design, test, and ship the solution.”
— Eric Eriksson

For product designers, making a design both usable and beautiful has gone from being the ultimate goal to table stakes. A product designer should be well versed in the business and its goals, working on problems that align with the strategy, vision, and resources of the company. They should have a deep understanding of the market, users, and competition that surround those problems. The more the product designer knows about the business, strategy, and goals, the closer they will be to addressing major pain points with well-crafted solutions.

Because they are involved in the creation and look and feel of the entire product, product designers have a variety of skills such as Animating, Prototyping, Coding, Research, Visual, Interaction Design, Psychology, and Business Strategy. Knowledge and experience in a wide range of disciplines positions the product designer as the custodians of the overall product experience. They work on closing the gap between the developer and the customer.

You may be thinking, how can one individual be responsible for the entire solution? Traditionally, many of the functions described above have been individual roles on small or large teams alike. Product managers may be scratching their heads after reading about designers becoming well versed in the business and its goals.

I will say this: it is less about one individual doing everything and more about the sharing of knowledge and bringing design principles and practices to the forefront of a solution.

For additional information on the role of a product designer, check out InVision’s Product Design overview.

Experience as a priority

Today, the most successful companies and products have one major thing in common: they are insanely focused on the user experience. And they should be: Designing for the user is good for business.

“Design-Driven Companies Outperform S&P by 2285 Over Ten Years”
— The DMI Design Value Index [3]

This fact should not surprise anyone who has worked near or around tech in the past decade. Consumers have become used to and now expect experiences from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple in any company or product they touch.

This focus on the user and experience has not always been the case in design. Aesthetics and beauty were valued more than function. Prototypr.io has a great short post (The Rise of Product Design) on the history and evolution of how and why the user became a priority in the design process.

For companies, the product and its experience have become key strategic differentiators. With the boom of technology, code has become easy to replicate and scale. Delivering a world-class product and customer experience is not.

In the business world, management is waking up to the idea that their employees are also “customers” that expect similar consumer-grade experiences. There is a revolution taking place in business software that will surely transform organizations into highly efficient, well-oiled machines of productivity. Many large industries, such as education or healthcare, have traditionally lagged in the adoption of technology. These industries are ripe for product designers to solve complex problems that affect users on a large scale.

“User experience has become a common expectation, even for business software. The advent of well-designed consumer experiences such as the iPhone, Facebook, and Netflix has set a precedent for people through everyday use. It used to be an expectancy that the software used at work would suck, but now we understand that it doesn’t actually have to be that way,”
— Ben Domanico, Head of Design at Patreon

The product designer is an always changing, ever-evolving role that will surely be in high demand as more organizations ride the wave of experience and look for new ways to innovate and deliver value to their customers.

Product Design and Product Management

How we build digital products has changed dramatically in recent years. Technology, advancements in human psychology, globalization, and new models of thinking all play a large role in how we take an idea and turn it into a reality.

The business world is great at process; whether it is waterfall, agile, lean, or the next new flavor of the month, there is a constant drive to figure out how to make products and build software quickly, cheaply, and effectively.

The renaissance of design and experience as a differentiator has also caused us to take a closer look at the roles we all play in bringing a product to life. The advancement of technology and new tools also play a very large role in how we create.

Visual design tools are advancing at a rapid pace, and we are coming closer and closer to creating a common language between design and development. Standing on the shoulders of giants before us, we are nearing this holy grail.

These changes have caused us to re-evaluate the role a designer plays in the product development lifecycle. Just as engineers are becoming “full-stack,” designers are also moving up the stack and taking on more responsibility in the development of new products. Much of this is happening naturally since the designer is closest to the creation of the actual visual elements of a product. The rapid advancement of visual design tools is putting less and less strain on the visual design process and opening up more time for a designer to spend on problem-solving and creating value for the user.

No one would argue that it is the designer’s job to remove the ambiguity from an idea or requirement and create a visual solution that addresses a need. However, we now realize the thinking applied to that process is very helpful in solving other problems related to businesses and their customers.

All of this has now led to an overlap in responsibility between design and product management. The product designer sits right in the middle and blends aspects of a Product Manager and designer. In many organizations, this will always remain two roles; however, companies are now starting to see the value in merging these roles into one. Regardless if this is one individual or two, the art of problem-solving will always need logic and creativity. If you can bring both types of thinking to an organization, you will be extremely valuable.

Designers can learn from Product Managers, and Product Managers can learn from designers. The burden of the problem identification and validation process should not rest only on the Product Manager’s shoulders, nor should the burden of world-class UX should rest solely with the designer. Product Design is not about role descriptions, more staff, or creating new titles; it is about making design a necessity in the product development process.

Chris Jones from SVPG has a great post (The Produce Designer Role) on this topic. Do yourself a favor, and read it. I have pulled part of it below:

“In the old model, designers took requirements or specifications from product managers and used that to create their designs. Modern product designers continuously collaborate with product managers and engineers. Rather than work on the latest project in “design phase” (ironic quotes), the modern product designer participates in all phases of a product, from discovery to delivery to iteration. Rather than sitting with fellow designers, the modern product designer sits together with his or her product manager and if at all possible the team of engineers building the product. Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of their product.
Given this, good product designers have many of the same concerns as product managers. They are deeply oriented around actual customers, and the value their product is bringing to those customers. They also understand that the product is in service of a business and can incorporate those concerns and constraints into the design of a product. Designers further understand that the user experience is as important to customer value as the underlying functionality.” [4]

For additional fun reading on this topic, check out Giff Constable’s post on the difference between design and product management.

Before I wrap up this chapter, I will add one final note. I often sit in the traditional product manager role, so if there is any concern or question to how this works practically, I can relate. And for those of you who may have a background in design, it’s not about design “owning” the entire process after years of pushing pixels in a dark corner. Design is not a magic bullet that will solve everyone’s problems; it is a way of thinking to solve problems. The more you dive into this vast domain, the better equipped you will be able to tackle any challenge that comes your way.

The goal of product designers should be to teach those around them to be more design-centric by practicing good design ourselves. Good design is non-denominational. Good design brings everyone into the fold, remember, we are all designers.

Continue to Chapter Two: Good Design →

Follow me on Medium and Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked this short handbook on digital product design!

[1] “Design for The Real World — Victor Papanek — Design Opendata.” https://designopendata.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/design-for-the-real-world-victor-papanek.pdf.

[2] “What is Digital Product Design? — NodeSource — Medium.” 2 Jun. 2015, https://medium.com/@nodesource/what-is-digital-product-design-93caad4e4035.

[3] “What is Digital Product Design? — NodeSource — Medium.” 2 Jun. 2015, https://medium.com/@nodesource/what-is-digital-product-design-93caad4e4035.

[4] “Design-Driven Companies Outperform S&P by 228% Over Ten Years ….” 10 Mar. 2014, https://www.dmi.org/blogpost/1093220/182956/Design-Driven-Companies-Outperform-S-P-by-228-Over-Ten-Years--The-DMI-Design-Value-Index.

[5] “The Product Designer Role | Silicon Valley Product Group.” 29 Aug. 2016, https://svpg.com/the-product-designer-role/.

]]> <![CDATA[3 Lessons Learned from the Founder of a Digital Health Zombie]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/3-lessons-learned-from-the-founder-of-a-digital-health-zombie-c37eaf48b87e?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/c37eaf48b87e Thu, 22 Aug 2019 02:25:34 GMT 2022-11-07T17:20:19.256Z
Illustration by Phanat Nen

Background

I’ve worked in and around tech for close to ten years. I’ve been a developer, project manager, product manager, designer, and sales guy. I’ve worn many hats.

My desire to start a digital health company was born out of my family's personal experience caring for my grandmother as she aged with Alzheimers and Dementia. I saw a system that was inefficient, outdated, slow, dangerous, and insert your favorite adjective to describe what is eating up close to 18% of our GDP as a nation. I had to do something about it.

Our experience as a family coordinating in-home and long-term care for my grandmother opened my eyes to how disconnected and fragmented healthcare services were outside of the hospital. Unlike the hospitals and health systems, which for better or worse were mandated to adopt technology to improve care, post-acute care providers still rely heavily on manual paper-driven processes to ensure a high quality of care and transparency during care delivery.

As someone who has worked for years digitizing processes and implementing technology to make humans more efficient, I saw this as a perfect area to apply technology to solve some of these manual problems. I did have previous healthcare experience, but not directly on the provider side. I partnered with a technical co-founder who had extensive experience building applications for providers in a major university health system.

Approach

From the start, I made a conscious decision to bootstrap the company. Taking this approach gave me a different set of experiences and lessons than a founder who went out and raised capital.

At the time, I was convinced that proving product-market fit through lean methodologies, getting traction, and then raising capital was the right approach toward building something viable. Given our circumstances, this was also the best approach to get an idea off the ground without taking on too much risk.

As a bootstrapped company, we didn’t have the resources or time to spend pursuing relationships with larger hospitals or systems. I also believed that if we were truly going to nail a problem, we had to work with providers who would be able to give us feedback quickly. We focused on non-medical and medical in-home care initially. Our customers were individual owner-operators, small franchises, home health agencies, and local hospitals.

How Far Did We Make It?

Overall, we spent about 9 months working nights and weekends on the project. We didn’t generate any revenue, nor did we officially launch. We were able to identify at least 10 customers who were willing to pilot with us. We were very grateful for their belief in us. We walked away somewhere along the journey toward product-market fit.

I saw the writing on the wall and had enough information to know that there are better avenues to get an idea off the ground in the healthcare industry. I wouldn’t have come to this realization without the hard lessons that can only come through experience. So whether you are a startup founder, a product manager, a developer, or someone passionate about making a difference in healthcare, I hope that what I share below can be of use to you along your journey.

Lesson 1: It takes more than the typical startup playbook to define your problem and achieve product-market fit in healthcare.

Illustration by Phanat Nen

I’ve sat through my fair share of healthcare conferences, pitch events, and demo days over the last few years. I’d go to these events mostly for their networking opportunities (I would also get a good rate if I registered my “startup”). At these events, I’d listen to the same bleak stats, problems, and potential solutions from similar entrepreneurs.

After going to a few of these conferences, it didn’t take me too long to realize that everyone reads the same stuff, quotes from the same sources, and uses the same words to describe his or her solution.

I’d walk away from these events with the same two questions:

  1. Everyone seems to know the problems, but why is it taking so long to solve them?
  2. And why do so many companies who try, fail along the way?

A startup is nothing more than a series of bets aimed at solving a problem or an unmet need. You start with a hypothesis and test that hypothesis over time to create something that your customer can’t live without. One of the tried and true methods for a startup to prove or disprove a hypothesis quickly and cheaply is the lean startup method.

For a consumer technology startup, this methodology is fairly straightforward — find a need, build an MVP, and iterate until your product meets the expectations of your customer. You win by “failing early and often” and by “moving fast and breaking things.”

However, healthcare is unlike any other industry.

I heard Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, illustrate this point a few years ago. Paraphrasing he said, “Typically you need three things for success in a startup — A good idea, a good team, and sufficient funding. But, in fintech and healthcare, you need a fourth, permission.”

A need for permission makes it very difficult for healthcare entrepreneurs to follow the typical startup model to build successful, long-lasting businesses. As a digital health entrepreneur, you can’t necessarily “move fast and break things” if you have to keep asking for permission and you surely can’t “fail early and often” if you are dealing with people’s lives.

Risk is deeply rooted in healthcare. If you are a provider dealing with patients lives, you do what works, even if it is inefficient. To change what you do or how you do it requires extensive evidence that has been gathered over time. Healthcare is risk-averse for a reason, but an environment that is resistant to change creates a challenge for any entrepreneur trying to get the right feedback quickly.

As a young startup going through the process of defining our problem and solution, we made some critical missteps by assuming what has worked in other industries or the tech sector would work in healthcare.

Simply put, we did not grasp the complexity of the environment we were working in.

If you are working on a digital health startup and following the typical startup playbook, you have to recognize that at best product feedback may be delayed or at worst that feedback is skewed because you are not operating in a true market. The delay in information or misinformation can blind you to reality as you define your problem, validate your assumptions, and develop your solution.

Here is the deal about innovating in healthcare. If you are not building something that will end up forcing policymakers to reconsider or change legislation, then you have to learn to play by the current set of rules. These rules, which again are created for a good reason — patient security, privacy, and health — limit the flow of information, create perverse incentives, and blind many to the underlying problems in healthcare.

We ended up putting a pause on Cord Health because we underestimated the problem and what it would take to solve it. We assumed that we could follow the same tried and true startup methods that have worked countless times in other industries and find similar success in healthcare. Instead of focusing on workflow, adoption, and outcomes, we got wrapped up in trying to become too many things to too many people.

A few takeaways for dealing with permission and defining your problem:

  • Educate yourself on the latest healthcare policy. For a great list of resources check out Geoffrey Clapp’s old but good piece on healthcare startups and policy.
  • Find someone who has extensive experience navigating the winds of change from the inside (payer or provider) and bring them on your team, even if it is in a consultative role.
  • Understand that if you are caught up on the latest trends and policy changes, your customer may not be (In fact, your customer may not even care. They most likely have other pressing needs that you should pay more attention to).
  • Focus on workflow, adoption, and outcomes. Don’t get caught up in trying to match your product or solution to some predefined marketing speak category.

Lesson 2: Know the difference between what your customer would love to use and what they would pay for.

Illustration by Phanat Nen

For a digital health startup, the answer to “Who is your customer?” isn’t so straightforward. If you are building technology in healthcare, you’ll most likely have multiple customer types.

During the first wave of digital health, many startups (including ours) sold directly to patients. Today, this is very hard to do. The market is flooded with sub-par products and patients are more concerned about privacy than ever before.

This is why 61% of digital health startups that start B2C end up pivoting to B2B and selling to payers, providers, and employers.

Yes, healthcare is becoming more and more consumer-friendly every year, but healthcare is not a consumer market. There is a difference. The former deals with expectations, and the latter deals with choice (Jordan L. Shlain MD has a great post on this topic).

In our case, nearly all of the families and patients that we spoke to loved our app, but they believed that the provider should offer our solution as a part of its services. So we pivoted and rethought how we were going to bring our value proposition to the patient and the family by selling our product directly to the provider.

Today, most digital health entrepreneurs have figured out that there are really only three tried and tested ways to get their product in the hands of patients without selling directly at them.*

  1. Have it prescribed or recommended by the provider
  2. Have it promoted by an insurance company
  3. Have it attached to an employee benefits program

The irony of making the pivot from B2C to B2B is that it isn’t any easier of a sell and you run into the same issues of adoption and retention that you faced while selling directly to the patient.

We made this pivot and struggled to find enough bold providers who were willing to pay for a pilot and could give us the scale to get off the ground. We observed several other startups face similar challenges moving from B2C to B2B.

Ultimately, we became obsessed with building a product based on what we thought needed to be fixed in healthcare, not what the industry needed or was willing to pay for.

Halle Tecco cautions entrepreneurs who fall into this similar trap with her post, A Caution for Would-be Digital Health Entrepreneurs.

“Too few entrepreneurs have grasped the distinction between a product that a physician would love to use and a product that is so critical to the business that a hospital is willing to pay for it.” — Halle Tecco

Successful digital health startups are the ones that have created strong value propositions that align the interests of those who are buying and those who are using the product (especially if the user is the patient).

Patients care about results, experience, quality, and trust.

Providers, payers, and employers want you to show them how you are going to save or make them money.

Unfortunately for us, our value proposition wasn’t strong enough to convince enough providers that they couldn’t live without us.

A few takeaways for finding your customer:

  • Clearly define the value proposition for all of your customer types and get it in front of them immediately. This takes time and hustle, but it’s in this work that you will be able to figure out if you have something or not.
  • Follow the money. Understand the incentives behind who is using your product vs. who is paying for it.
  • Make sure you plan to demonstrate the outcomes of your product. Not just benefits, but the actual outcomes. How are you moving the needle for your customer?
  • If a customer isn’t willing to pay for a pilot or invest their time, move on.
  • Find customers who “get it” and are willing to give you feedback and want to see you improve. You’ll know these customers when they are the ones following up with you on your progress.

Lesson 3: You aren’t in the business of selling technology, you are in the business of selling a new future.

Illustration by Phanat Nen

Once we identified our customers, we graduated to the next challenge — how do we get a pilot and get paid?

As a startup building out its MVP, we determined that piloting our software would give us the feedback and credibility needed to gain traction in the space. I mentioned earlier, our target customers were small to midsize home care and home health providers. We intended to focus on a niche market and work with forward-thinking companies and new entrants. I believed that this strategy would allow us to avoid long sales cycles and get off the ground quickly. I also thought the fastest way to sell into a larger franchise or a system was to work with the emerging companies that scare them.

Working with the long-tail of healthcare providers had its obstacles, but I would say that a majority of the challenges we faced weren’t unique to our customer type or size. In the healthcare industry, whether you are working with a large system or a small independently owned provider, you still face the same customer obstacles of limited time, a lack of resources, little money, and a low appetite for risk.

With Cord Health, we were able to work with amazing people who genuinely believed in what we were trying to do and supported us along the way, but they were the exception rather than the norm. If I classified our customers into three types it would be as follows:

  1. The forward-thinking customer that wanted to be a part of and drive change in the industry. This customer was ready to pilot and invest in our success both financially and with their time.
  2. The customer that recognized a need for change, but wasn’t going to lead the pack. This customer would give feedback, but they were hesitant to pilot and weren’t ready to invest financially in our success through a pilot.
  3. The customer who was at risk because they were so far behind the times that they would do anything to catch up. This customer was distracted and grasping for anything that would help them survive. Working with this customer was a coin flip. Some were ready to move, while others were indecisive.

Our challenge, along with many other digital health startups, was that a majority (close to 90%) of customers or potential customers fell into the second bucket. These customers didn’t want to be the first to move or the last to move, they embraced the status quo. Unfortunately, they’ve also been burned by technology companies who have over-promised and underdelivered in the past. Technology isn’t viewed as positively in healthcare as compared to other industries.

So how do you overcome the status quo in an industry that is hesitant to adopt new technology?

For one, you don’t do what we did and force the benefits of your technology on your customers.

Selling customers a new flashy piece of technology that will allow them to “become more efficient” or “generate more revenue” does not work anymore.

We knew the bar for healthcare technology was high, but we underestimated what our customers needed to implement and support our technology (and we didn’t make it beyond pilot). As a bootstrapped startup, we weren’t properly equipped to support our customers as they navigated the change our product would bring into their organization. We were selling technology to drive systematic change that neither we nor our customer was able to undertake.

As a digital health entrepreneur, you must realize that you can’t come into this industry, build great technology, and sell it with great customer success and change management tactics. In the healthcare industry, you have to recognize that you aren’t just in the business of selling technology, you are also in the business of selling a new future.

A few takeaways for working with your customers and selling your product:

  • Don’t be afraid to partner early on. If I had to do it over again, I’d rather be the vendor to one large company than chase the long tail.
  • If you are building an MVP, seek out customers that can provide scale, resources, and support.
  • If you are pre-MVP, explore options to co-develop your idea with either other existing startups or large customers.
  • If you are piloting, ensure both parties are aligned to the goals and expectations for the pilot. Pilot users should already be your customer, or you should have the plan to obtain them as customers after a successful pilot.

Conclusion

If you are a tech entrepreneur that is new to healthcare, stay humble and learn. The healthcare industry isn’t waiting for you to liberate it from the shackles of its outdated technology. Remember, healthcare is the only industry in which technology is used as an excuse for its rising costs. Healthcare needs individuals who are willing to take the time to become a student of the game before stepping on the court.

If you have been in the game for a while don’t get caught up by the hype of new technology and try to fit solutions to problems. Work with entrepreneurs to help them better understand the rules of the game so that they can better understand the real problems that need to be solved.

Remember, it is a privilege to work in this industry and to do work that can affect people’s lives. Don’t take it for granted. The thing about sickness is that it doesn’t discriminate. We are all human and we will all need healthcare at some point in our lives. We don’t have time to waste building a system that doesn’t work for everyone.

  • I have to give a shoutout to Touré McCluskey and his post on startups, disruption, and cooperation for this point. His post inspired me to share these lessons from the trenches.

Follow me on Medium and on Twitter (@andrewzallie), and don’t forget to clap if you liked the article!

]]> <![CDATA[What do startup pitch events and an early 90’s board game have in common?]]> https://medium.com/@andrewzallie/what-do-startup-pitch-events-and-an-early-90s-board-game-have-in-common-b74da2dcd23?source=rss-d025f3e70a96------2 https://medium.com/p/b74da2dcd23 Thu, 09 Jun 2016 12:03:13 GMT 2016-06-09T12:03:13.701Z Does anyone remember Taboo? It was that game where you had guess the word on your partners card without using the word itself or the 5 other words that were also on the card.

It was THE game played by all the cool kids in the early 90's. Typically played on a rainy Friday or Saturday nights with some Dominos Pizza and a 2 liter bottle of Coke.

Or was that just me?

Anyway.

I want to bring it back.

But this time, instead of being the game played on rainy Friday nights, I want to create a new version for investors and entrepreneurs.

Think of it as the Taboo for the startup world.

Every time a founder pitches his or her idea to an investor, the investor will pull a card and require the entrepreneur to explain their idea without using any of the listed startup jargon on the card.

Who’s with me?

THIS COULD END ALL STARTUP JARGON.

I just got back from a startup conference and my head still hurts. I sat through 20 or so pitches over the past two days and my brain feels like it has been cut by a thousand swords.

I’m pretty sure to be an entrepreneur they give you a list of 50 words that you are required to use any time you speak.

It felt like Inception.

No better…Groundhogs day (that will be my last 90's reference this post.)

I don’t think it is intentional that we gravitate toward similar words and phrases to explain ideas, but I do believe it is a problem when we begin to use the same words to describe very different ideas.

Ok maybe I am being a little dramatic.

But there is little denying, jargon limits our ability to communicate effectively.

So here is something that we all need to be aware of and think about when we pitch investors, present ideas or simply communicate.

Our brain is constantly trying to do one thing and one thing only.

Survive.

And to survive, our brain asks two simple questions when it processes information.

Is the information coming at me dangerous, or is it novel?

If the information presented to our brain is dangerous or abstract we classify the information as a threat and push it away.

If the information presented to our brain is not new or novel we classify the information as safe and ignore it.

Jargon, buzzwords, or whatever you want to call these words that are normal speak in the startup world are dangerous and definitely not new or novel.

I didn’t make this stuff up. I read it in a book.

But seriously, it is science.

So let’s keep it simple.

Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed it, hit that heart button below. Would mean a lot to me and it helps other people see the story.

]]>