A pragmatic design approach for early-stage startups
I co-founded Monito more than four years ago, with no prior experience working as a designer.
My two co-founders worked on the business and user-acquisition side of things, while I was in charge of building our product, with the help of freelance developers.
We are now a team of 8 people, our comparison platform for international money transfer is used by tens of thousands of users each week and we just raised a US $2.5 Million Serie A, but I am still the only non-developer in the product team.
We are now at a turning point in how we do design at Monito, as we are looking for a senior UX/UI designer to bring our product to the next level in terms of user experience.
What I will do in this post is to explain the very pragmatic approach to product design we took so far and describe how I see this evolving in the near future.
Why it can make sense to implement ideas before doing user research
As we began working on Monito, I read quite a few books about design, and by far the most relevant for me was UX for Lean startups by Laura Klein. It fits within the broader “Lean Startup” methodology of Eric Ries which we were already using and was packed with real-world examples and insights that were directly actionable for me: a young founder with no prior experience and only part of his time dedicated to UX design.
The main principle I learned (and live by since) is that I need to be efficient at testing ideas, at each stage of the ideation process, and each time with the right tools.
I learned to quickly make high-definition prototypes that could be used for remote user testing with tools such as UserBrain or UsabilityHub, I started adding tracking software such as Mixpanel and Hotjar to our website so that I could better understand how our users were interacting with our product, but more importantly, I developed a mindset of working on “Minimum Viable Feature” that could be implemented with little to no coding required so that our developers could focus on developing proven features.
Being able to quickly test a lot of ideas was especially useful in a context where most of the ideas we were working on didn’t come out of a very established user-research framework, but rather from our gut-feeling of what would work.
Many would argue here that I should have started by taking the time to empathize with the needs of my users, dedicating most of my time to user-research to understand them better. But in the early days of a project, I believe it actually makes more sense to rely more on your instincts while making sure you are able to quickly and cheaply validate whether or not an idea is worth pursuing.
Once you have people that are testing your prototypes (and later using the early version of your product), you will have much more material and data to base your user research on and actual users to send your survey to.
My interpretation of the design thinking approach is that you can start wherever you want in the circle depicted below, as long as you never stop iterating throughout the whole process.
Many designers I discuss with insist on first spending a lot of time in the “first” phase of the design thinking approach in order to understand your users before you start prototyping your product, but it’s often because they either work in an agency or a company where they actually don’t have the option to go through the design thinking process more than once, which means they have a lot of pressure to “get it right” on their first try.
But working at a startup means you iterate through this process often, and more rapidly. You are also much closer to your users and product, which means the feedback loop really works: you can analyze the analytics of your product when it’s live, launch surveys to hear back from your users, etc.
For these reasons, I found that it was often easier, faster and cheaper to actually launch a minimum viable feature and see how users interact with it, rather than launching a survey and conducting user interviews.
Towards a more systematic design approach
In the past years, we set up a very efficient approach to test new ideas and iterate on those ideas quickly. But Monito is now at a point where it is necessary to implement a more systematic approach to how we design our product.
We first need to invest more time to empathize with our users (and more importantly potential new users) and understand their pain points, extending the scope of our user research beyond the boundaries of our current product.
Our user research was mostly focused on understanding how our current users are using our current product, in order to make it better. With more time dedicated to user research and a more rigorous approach, we will be able to shape the future evolutions of our product and make sure they answer the needs of our current and future users.
Secondly, we need to implement a design system to provide our users with a more consistent experience. We need to maintain our ability to scale and make rapid evolutions to our product while making sure we build a visually appealing and coherent user interface.
If those challenges sound interesting and you think you are just the person to lead us in this transition, I want to hear from you! Please have a look at why it’s awesome to work at Monito and apply to become our next Senior UX/UI designer.
