3 things I learned as a designer at Duo
About a year and half ago, I was looking for my next design gig and wanted to be at a company with a rock solid design team, a collaborative culture, and a place where user-centeredness was very much baked into the culture. Most top of mind for me was finding a place where there were more senior designers and managers than myself, whom I would have the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from. This is what led me to Duo Security (now part of Cisco), the Ann Arbor / Austin-based cybersecurity company most well-known for it’s 2-factor (2FA) authentication solution.
You probably don’t equate a cybersecurity company with design, but UX and making security more human is truly at the center of all things at Duo Security. During my time at Duo, I learned so much from both working with my cross-functional partners (engineering and product management) and, of course, from the 40+ members of the design and research team.
Fast forward a year and half later and with me moving on, these are 3 of the main learnings I’ll be taking with me:
1. Intentionality
Almost everything at Duo starts with a plan. Because they are in the cybersecurity space, with large organizations and universities relying on their technology to protect their most important work applications, the common tech adage of “move fast and break things” often doesn’t apply. Some may see this as a negative, but I see as a positive. By not being in a rush to ship product or simply flinging things out there to see what sticks, but instead being intentional about what they are building, the company can ensure that whatever they do build is both useful and usable for their customers. This often means a fair amount of upfront research, lead by designers, design researchers, and PMs.
As a designer at Duo, it was necessary to be intentional prior to hopping into any project. Thinking about, writing down, and sharing out:
What is the plan for the project?
What research do I need to embark on?
What questions or assumptions do we have that we need to research?
Who did I need to involve?
Putting together a plan does take time, but it helps to not only give yourself an idea of where you want to go and what goals to achieve, but gives transparency to teammates and managers. For instance, if my plan required assistance from the design research team, having an idea of where and when I could use their help, would then help them plan out their quarter since they were not only working with me but 30 other designers as well.
2. The beauty of a user-centered culture
At Duo, there isn’t a fight as to why designers or researchers should go speak with users. Instead, the question when the product team is uncertain is often “Should we go talk to users?”
Yes, the space can get complex and therefore engineering-heavy — after all we are talking about cybersecurity. But, the culture of the company is one that emphasizes the end users and involving them at each step of the way. As a designer, this lifts a huge mental load. Since you don’t have to fight for why you should be doing upfront user research, testing early concepts, or doing usability testing later on, your mental energy can almost solely be focused on designing a great product for your end users. This results in, you guessed it, a great product for the end users.
A few anecdotes to point out here. First, is that everyone from customer support to engineering knows and discusses the personas. The two core Duo personas are based on years of actual research, baked into Duo culture, and penetrate daily conversations everyday throughout the company. Second, for my user interviews, concept tests, or usability tests, I often would have at least a few of my engineering teammates participate. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it says to me that understanding who we are building for is indeed important and that it’s not only up to Design, PM, and Customer Support to stay close to the customer. I distinctively remember a time when the Engineering Manager for my team asked if we could have more user touchpoints and urged our engineers to get involved any chance they got. This showed me early on just how baked in user-centeredness is in the company.
3. Effective communication
I was on a project pairing up with a fellow, more senior designer named Kristen. What we were doing research and design on was not to be implemented by our engineering team for another 1–2 quarters. We were effectively ‘sprinting ahead’ as the engineering team was focused on back-end work.
It might feel intuitive in this situation, to NOT bother the engineering team with work they wouldn’t be tackling for another 3–6 months. But Kristen proposed the opposite: “What about doing a weekly design share where we share all the insights we are learning as well as any in-flight designs?”
These design shares would effectively get at a few things 1) they would build team camaraderie as our engineering teammates would have an idea of what we were working on 2) they would again point back to the importance of everyone being user-centered and clued in to the pain points and goals of our users and 3) they could unearth any technical constraints that might be hidden in our design solutions
Well, fast forward a month, and it was in one of these design shares where we discovered that the design solution that Kristen and I were considering would be really technically challenging to implement and based on the importance of this feature, not likely worth it. We could instead come up with a different solution to solve the same user need.
What would have happened if we didn’t have these weekly shares? We would have gone down a path to fully flush out this design solution only to find out later that it wouldn’t be able to be implemented. With effective communication and Kristen’s idea of a weekly share out, we were able to save months’ of work.
I realize after reading through this it may seem like this is a puff piece for Duo. It is not — Of course Duo, like any company, has its own quirks and places for improvements. However, it is a company and design culture (with many awesome designers and researchers) that made me a much better overall designer.
Often, when we think of design we think of the output, the pixels on the screen. But being at Duo, taught me that everything before that — being super intentional with our goals and plans and communicating out as much as possible— is just as, if not more important in creating a well-designed experience.
