Lessons Learnt From Hosting ProductTank Lausanne Meetup #2
Last Thursday we hosted the second ProductTank Meetup in Lausanne at Studio Banana with our international and local speakers: Vitaly Friedman, co-founder of Smashing Magazine, Stéphane Cruchon founder of Design Sprint and Marc Friederich, co-founder of Antistatique.
The three topics covered over the evening were:
- Big Bang Redesign — Vitaly Friedman
- Inside a Design Sprint — Stéphane Cruchon
- Design Documentation made to last — Marc Friederich
Here is a short recap of the event and the topics covered along with the speakers slides from the evening.
ProductTank was founded in 2010 in London and today spans over 100 cities with over 50,000 members. It is an informal meetup that brings together the local product community in each of those cities — whether they’re Product Managers, Designers, or Developers — to share their experience and knowledge. ProductTanks are always free to attend, organized by volunteers from the local product community, and supported by our generous sponsors. — http://www.producttank.com/
The Intro @Studio Banana, Lausanne
ProductTank meetups are active in over 100 cities around the world and they’re hosted by volunteers from the local product community. Why did I choose to get involved as an organizer? As co-founder of a digital, design and events agency here in Lausanne, it’s an opportunity for me to stay on top of the latest product trends and grow my network with like minded people.
The speakers
Vitaly Friedman, Co-founder of Smashing Magazine
Vitaly is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, an online magazine for professional web developers and designers. With over 4 million readers and 1 million Twitter followers, Smashing Magazine is a go to source for the web community.
With Smashing Magazine going through their own Big Bang Redesign, it was fitting that Vitaly’s presentation focussed on past, current and future web design trends. Vitaly encouraged the audience to break the norm, pick one or two key traits and build websites that portray personality “Our solutions have to be better and smarter. Fewer templates, frameworks and trends, and more storytelling, personality and character.” — Source, Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine.
Vitaly continued his presentation with examples of some of his favourite websites. A particular example that stood out to me was Hans Brinker, a hostel renowned for being one of the worst in the Amsterdam (maybe even the world). Hans Brinker saw it’s room bookings steadily declining and with only a limited budget and a bad reputation, the owners took the bold decision to invest their money into a new website rather than into upgrading the hostel. The resulting website was a hit, utilising imagery and great copy to highlight the same ‘charm’ as the hostel itself — they’ve now even opened a second location in Lisbon.
Read more of Vitaly’s thoughts on web design on Smashing Magazine, Web Design Is Not Dead.
Stéphane Cruchon, Founder of Design Sprint
Stéphane is a Swiss designer with over 10 years of experience in agencies crafting website and designing apps. He is the first organizer of Design Sprints in Switzerland and works with startups and big companies in the area to implement the Design Sprint method.
The idea behind the Design Sprint method is to reduce the risk of brining an unwanted product to market. The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
“Examples of situations that invite a Design Sprint
- Are you launching a new product or a service?
- Are you extending an existing experience to a new platform?
- Do you have an MVP but need an injection of UX / UI Design?
- Are you considering adding new features and functionality to your product?
- Does your product have opportunities for improvement (e.g. a high rate of cart abandonment?)
- Do you want to empower your team and increase sharing and collaboration?”
— Source, Design Sprint, Wikipedia
Stéphane presented us with a client story of his own working with Autodesk, a company with over 9million users, 120 products and operating in 18 different languages. The challenge Autodesk brought to the table was “How to speed up the decision steps in the translation process of our software?”.
Stéphane’s approach to the challenge was a 5 day design sprint which engaged Autodesk’s senior level staff from different departments and flown in as far from their offices in US. The 5 days consisted of:
- Step 1: Understanding & Experience Mapping
- Understanding the problematic (User interviews, focus groups with customers, surveys, analysis)
- Define the metrics of success - Day 2 — Sketching & Defining
- Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem - Day 3 — Deciding & Wire-framing
- Arriving all together to a single idea
- Mocking up the designs for the prototype - Day 4 — Prototyping
- Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people - Day 5 — Learning
- Conduct user testing and see if the prototype works to reach the goal
- Summarise learnings from the sprint
Find out more about the Design Sprint methodology Stéphane uses in his slides here.
Marc Friedman, Co-Founder and Software Designer
Marc is co-founder of Antistatique, a web agency in Lausanne and Geneva creating digital solutions. At Antistatique, Marc ensures client project are executed well from their conception to publication and advises clients on how to apply their digital strategy.
Marc’s role requires the need to be clear and concise so naturally his presentation focussed on ‘Design Documentations Made To Last’.
A software design document [Design Documentation] is a written description of a software product, that a software designer writes in order to give a software development team overall guidance to the architecture of the software project.
— Source: Software design description
Marc went on to walk us through a project Antistatique completed with the Swiss government and showed us extracts from their several hundred page design documentation. Everything from the use of the logo online/on vehicles/on products to the spacing on a web page had been considered and documented so that the clients have a permanent guide for all future iterations.
Through Marc’s presentation, we learnt what makes good design documentation and why it matters:
- To communicates the design itself
- To explains the rationale behind decisions made
- To create trust and provide consistency for future iterations
- To tell the high-level story
- To stitch together the big picture
- To get internal stakeholders excited about the vision
- To save time for future designers/developers
— Source: “Why Design Documentation Matters”
We also learned that to Marc, clear design documentation goes beyond organisational needs and is also an essential step towards supporting the open source initiative.
To learn more about design documentation's, check out Marc’s slides here
The Food & Drinks
No event is complete without great food and drinks, and we’re lucky to have amazing partners who sponsor our meetups. Thanks to Urban Kombucha, Le Smart Cake, and Biotta for the delicious treats that fuelled us late into the evening.
The Community
Every meetup we’ve seen the ProductTank community grow and it’s been rewarding to see returning members like Bastien, Géraud, Raphael, Orlane, to only name a few. The feedback we’ve recieved thus far has been very positive and Camille, Reginald and myself are excited to host more ProductTank meetups in the future.
If you’d like to join us, our next ProductTank meetup will be in Geneva on the 17th of August at FintechFusion, you can RSVP here.
Thank you.
- Camille Bossel, Mathilde Michel and Reginald Bien Aimé for the organization👏
- Samantha and Key from Studio Banana for the venue🍌
- Mary Pugin for the photos 📷
- UX Lausanne for bringing Vitaly to Switzerland! 🇨🇭
- The ProductTank Lausanne community 🎉
- Our food and drink sponsors, Urban Kombucha, Biotta and Le Smart Cake 😁
- Marc at MindTheProduct for the continued support 💪
Arman Anaturk
Co-Founder at OneRoof.Agency, Vice-president at FoodHack, organiser of Product Tank Geneva/Lausanne. Find me eating food and travelling on Instagram, sharing stuff on Twitter and not sure what exactly on Linkedin.
