Navigating Product Decisions

A Figma Africa AMA Session on “Navigating Product Decisions” with Usman Abiola

Event Statistics

Event Venue:
Figma Africa Slack

Date & Time:
Thursday, 23rd July 2020 | 4:00 PM WAT

Guest:
Usman Abiola

The discussion

Question:
Welcome to today’s session on Navigating Product decisions with Usman Abiola who will start off with a self-introduction and then we can start asking our questions ❤️

Usman Abiola
Thanks for having me. I’m Usman Abiola Amusat. I’m currently a product design manager at Smile Identity. I enjoy product design genuinely. I think that’s pretty much about me.

Question:
Welcome Usman 🙌🏾
How can I make my contribution count in a team where I’m the smallest and youngest designer?

Usman Abiola
Essentially, how do you make anything count? Simply by showing the value that it offers. We make politicians count because they pitched us their “supposed value points” that matter to us. Fix our roads, build schools etc.

Bring this back to the context of design: You need to pitch your value props. These few tips could help.

1. Speak to the customers ( >4) directly (Always). Mostly behind the back of everyone
2. Understand their pain points beyond “We want you to add x or y features”
3. Write a design thesis — A breakdown of how that pain point is costing the company revenue or can make the company more revenue.
4. Share this with the team. Drive the conversation from that thesis forward.

Question:
Design thesis? Can you explain more?

Usman Abiola
Here’s an example

Question:
What is the best way to present my design decisions to stakeholders such that it is assertive and practical. Basically, how can I make my opinion matter more on a product?

Usman Abiola
Generally, usability testing helps out with this. But I know a lot of designers (including me) are too lazy to go out to do the actual testing with its proper heuristics. So I’d advise testing with the actual customers who care enough to pay (your company) for your “better suited” opinion.

Side thought: I’m generally not worried about my opinion as long as the best opinion that is going to deliver the best value to the user is adopted.

Question:
What qualifies a decision as the right one?

Usman Abiola
Two cues:

1. The one that improves the UX of the customers and makes your company achieve any of their KPIs (could be revenue, general product usability, or brand positioning)
2. The one that you tested with a customer(s) before and after you implemented the solution.

Question:
What factors should one consider when trying to convince his colleagues of his ideas and suggestions?

Usman Abiola
A few things on top of my head:

1. Why does this problem matter to anyone?
2. How best can “my colleagues” adopt this solution I’m thinking about? This doesn’t mean all your designs should be the “MVP” of what it should have been.
3. Speak to your colleagues frequently. Understand what they consider to be a good idea. Is it the one that’s easy to implement in the short term? or the one that’s the best to implement for the product in the long term?

Side thought: I will surely know the limitations of a frontend engineer after two feature implementations.

Side thought: Some engineers don’t really have that many limitations. They just don’t pay attention to details.

Question:
Hi Usman, i’d like to ask — How do you handle creativity, how do you stay creative and also how do you balance innovation and a standard design process?

Usman Abiola
Honestly, there’s no one-size fit all answer to this but I’m not worried about creativity. If you work in a fast-paced product team where problem briefs are shared daily, you will have a standard dose of “instincts” that helps you build quality design solutions around the problems than perspiring around creativity.

Also, look at good designs every day. Not dribbble always.

Question:
How to create a good problem brief? I am the sole ux guy with a product manager in my team, so set some standards to keep creativity and problem solving flowing

Usman Abiola
This is a fine synopsis to follow.

1. What is the problem?
2. Who exactly is this problem affecting?
3. What are the available ways to solve the problem?
4. What’s the best way to solve this?
5. Test… Test… Test.. and don’t ask open-ended questions e.g. “Do you like it?”, “is it fine?”
6. Craft quality validation questions e.g. “How best do you imagine this problem be solved for you”?

Question:
How can one navigate through those quick impromptu decisions that can’t be backed data because they are more a gut instinctive feeling?

Usman Abiola
Honestly, always advocate for the proper design process. Sometimes, your team will not listen.

Make sure and this is important that you have your best opinion documented and get validation from key customers to back it up.

Side thought: If you want to get something done in a particular firm I work with:

Just have two interviews (min. 30 mins each) and ascertain from the customer (you can record voice note) how this is delaying/discouraging them from spending more money on the platform. Simple!

Question:
What methods do you adopt when conducting user research?
Also, can you walk us through your ideal design process?

Usman Abiola

1. My process begins with Research. A lot of research to fine-tune my understanding of the problems to be solved. Why is this a problem? What’s the business impact of this problem? What’s the main pain point to the user? etc.
2. Following in-depth research, comes the ideation stage. Ideation is the phase where the magic happens and where the fun lies. I begin with these questions: what are the existing solutions available for this problem? What are its limitations? Then I craft a design thesis for the problem. I proceed to create low fidelity mockups for the solution iteration. I am very particular about this stage because I believe “low fidelity design gets high-level feedback while high fidelity designs get low-level feedback.”
3. Now is the time to test the iteration prototypes with the team and actual users (via video calls, feedback sheet, Invision, Balsamiq etc) to get as much constructive feedback as possible.
4. This is followed by analysing and filtering all feedback into one solution funnel. I use this to create the next low-fidelity iteration which will be shared for review.
5. After the general acceptance of the low fidelity prototype — then, I continue onto create high fidelity mockups. Design components (font type & size, color palettes, buttons, grid layout etc) are first crafted and decided to enable consistency and to serve as the building blocks for a supposed design system.
6. With the completion of the high fidelity mocks, usability testing begins with specific user groups and test cases.
7. Feedback from the test sessions will be used to create the final iteration which will be presented in a case study presentation to the team.
8. However, the ideal design process is endless. You can never achieve an ‘ultimate’ or ‘perfect’ solution. With every iteration, you can only get closer to it.

Question:
How many users do you actually recruit to test a product feature to know if its actually solving their problem

Usman Abiola
Depends on the size of the user base.
>100 users = 5–10 users for testing selected based on how (more and less) frequent they use the platform or a specific module of the platform.

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