How design at Adore Me empowers women to embrace their uniqueness
An interview with Alexandra Diaz, UX Design Lead
Adore Me is a disruptive e-commerce startup, revolutionizing the lingerie industry and how women shop for intimates today. Their lingerie empowers women to embrace their inner confidence and uniqueness. Alexandra Diaz joined the company in 2013 and has been instrumental in building the design team and fostering a design centric culture.
We spoke with Alexandra about what it’s been like to build the UX team from the ground up and some of the challenges experienced along the way.
How did you start at Adore Me?
I’ve been with Adore Me for about 4 years now and joined right when we were really beginning to gain a lot of momentum as a company. We had just raised our Series B when I was brought on and really was the only digital designer on board. At that time we were very much a startup and have since grown to a team of 3 UX designers and 2 graphic designers.
Could you tell me a little bit more about what that transition was like?
When I first started, Adore Me was still small and I really was the design team. This meant working across the company’s different verticals to provide a wide range of design deliverables. Previous to working at Adore Me, I was a part of a similar startup environment and jumped at the chance to continue to wear different hats as a designer. At the time this is really the type of environment I was looking for. Being able to contribute design across multiple channels was instrumental in helping define the impact of design very early on. It helped me grow professionally by allowing me to exercise and develop the lateral thinking that comes from working across multiple areas of focus.
Eventually as the company grew, so did the team. Adore Me’s design team really has grown in tandem with the rest of the company and we’ve been able to foster a very empowering environment. It took a while to build a solid foundation for us to grow from but it’s something we all felt was really important to do the right way. Design is really at the center of our product and experience as a brand, so laying that foundation has really helped us scale the team successfully.
How does design fit within Adore Me’s culture?
Adore Me is a design conscious company so when we started to plan out the team, we took a similar problem solving approach to how we would with our garments. With our garment and product design we start high level and then go deeper making sure the fit is right at each step.
Today the design team actually sits with the stakeholders to have a more transparent view of pain points. For example having transparency with the marketing team while working on branding has a big impact on our output. Still being relatively small allows us to more easily understand the pain points in designs and validate what works and what doesn’t. Design thinking and influence really carries over across our teams at Adore Me.
Our ux design team, excluding myself, is based remotely in Romania and integrated into separate Customer Software feature teams. With this in mind, it’s vital that we have a clear channel of communication and processes in place to best collaborate with each other. Wake has been a huge part of that.
With teams based overseas how do you collaborate remotely?
As the team expanded here in NY and in Romania there was a pretty fundamental need to communicate more efficiently about works in progress. The team in Romania handles a couple different aspects of our design work so it was clear to us that we needed to translate our work between designers to not only provide more visibility, but also to also harbor a more collaborative space.
Wake became a way to share works in progress and concepts of our web and e-commerce work. With more content and remote teams, work was at risk of being muted or lost. After incorporating Wake, we were able to share designs much earlier on and communicate feedback more clearly. We sketch things out quite a bit and upload them to Wake to get ideas out there fast. Iterating designs on the whiteboard doesn’t really help our designers working remotely. Adding all those initial thoughts and concepts to Wake really helped create more of a connection between us.
What are some things unique to the design team at Adore Me you haven’t seen elsewhere?
We embody our company values on a daily basis. Building a customer focused product, our design and digital work is always thinking of the customer’s experience and journey first. Our core values — Dare, Perform & Grow allow us to challenge ourself and product. Stepping outside our comfort zone has been really unique to the team here and something I think that may be seen more with teams in startup environments. People take design risks but ideas are never shot down. Our values and the empowering culture of Adore Me really help designers share their voice.
I tend to joke with designers that my goal is for them to leave any call or meeting with me asking more questions than they had going in. Not as a hinderance, of course, but as a way for them to think about design problems from a different perspective. Asking the questions, prompts curiosity. I want to empower and challenge our design team to really push themselves past the boundaries we tend to set ourselves when we’re too close to a project. There’s far more to learn and discover when you scratch past the surface.
Our company values are up on our office walls, serving as a constant reminder that we’re all working towards the same things. And for me, as the UX Design Lead, it’s more about creating the space within that environment for everyone to have their voices heard.
What are some of the challenges you face as a design team?
I think the main challenge in design today is adapting to the times. Things in the fabric of tech and design are changing so quickly, that soon enough all of our existing roles are going to be things of the past and designers overall are going to have to evolve. That said, creative problem solving will always have a place. So, even though roles and specialties may shift, in the end it’s still going to be about being able to create a system, delivering an experience, and most importantly making a connection.
What are some of your influences outside UX and Design that shape your process or you look to for inspiration?
A lot of it comes from my previous experience studying environmental design at the University of Puerto Rico. I think starting outside of tech really lended a lot of experiences to form my abilities when I was working on my own or with a smaller team. Photography has always been a passion as well. I think that taking on any new challenges is an exercise in and of itself that anyone can draw inspiration from. The mentality of getting out of a comfort zone with new endeavors, whether they relate to design or not, will always lead to a change in perspective which can only make design that much richer.
Thanks to Alexandra Diaz for sharing her insights on design and collaboration. You can follow her on Twitter, or find out more about what Adore Me is doing at AdoreMe.com.
To change the way your team collaborates, check out Wake — a private space to share and discuss design work with your team.
