What we learned from designing Pickyourtrail through 2019.
Another year’s gone by and yet again everyone’s surprised by the speed at which it has. I think it’s about time we collectively came to terms with the fact that years typically don’t take too long to get by. Having said that, ~320 days is a substantial amount of time to ‘get shit done’ and so, here’s a bit of retrospection into the year that was, for design at Pickyourtrail.
Jan — Feb — Mar
#rebranding #the2weekdesignsprint #moremarketing #morepartnerships #cred #bali #maldivesexperience #companyschwag
The new year (2019) started off with a bang, January marking the move to our largest office yet, a sprawling 15,000 sqft space in the heart of Chennai, India. We released our brand new logo, ‘veho’, making the move to our newly dolled up office just a tad more special. By February, our team had grown from 3 to 6 designers spanning product, motion and visual design. As a nascent team, we were still finding our footing in the organisation, carving out our little niche of wonder, excitement and creativity and forging independent working relationships with the product & engineering teams which too were seeing significant developments and additions. It was around this time that we adopted a simple 2 week sprint work-flow cycle. We’d send out a fortnightly ‘job-request’ email to all stakeholders, and plan the following 2 weeks with the tasks we received. Prior to this, there wasn’t any formal work-flow management system in place and things were mostly picked up on the fly. The newly adopted sprint system worked fine for the most part, barring the times we’d end up having to change our scope mid-sprint, usually owing to higher priority task additions, or a lack of clarity on the requests altogether. Hindsight though is indeed 20/20, and it’s certainly much easier today, to identify the things we should’ve done to avoid work-flow breakages. Having said that, I’m willing to bet these teething issues are what make our learnings stick, and our teams grow. By the end of the quarter, despite the minor setbacks, we’d managed to ship out some crucial projects comprising of our maiden partnership with CRED, our first destination specific product experience for Maldives, and an entire swag kit for the company, to name just a few.
Things we learned — Unless absolutely necessary, push back on poorly planned tasks that throw off your planned goals.
Discipline to follow plans made cannot be overstated. Too often designers pardon ad hoc requests from stakeholders, not realising its implications on the general organisational discipline and regard for planning. For the most part, things that are last minute tend more to be a function of poor planning, than a function of spontaneity and a spark of genius. Having said that, I’m no colonial apologist and I certainly don’t intend on replicating the bureaucratic mess they left us with, but a simple process never hurt a puppy.
Apr — May — Jun
#q1betsblooming #designokrs #newappfeatures #gamifyingmaldives #onboardingsystemdesign #newtripplannerux #designorgchart
The new quarter saw our best bets in Q1 bloom into good business decisions. Our partnerships with CRED and Tourism Australia were getting a lot of traction and our self-serve play for Maldives was receiving positive reviews from users. In addition to supporting these initiatives we aligned ourselves to the org’s quarterly OKRs, in the common top-down fashion. While it was imperative we saw these projects through, having a couple of bottom-up OKRs for the team would be crucial to ensure the general hygiene of the design function. We decided to make some inroads to more long-term-impact projects like a UI audit to lay the foundations for a future design systems project, and a small but reusable brand animation library to speed up TAT on motion & video design tasks. However, as it often is with owned OKRs, the former was shelved for a better, more conducive time, and we ended up with a rather sparse brand animation library. That said, I don’t think I personally did a very good job at convincing non-design stakeholders on the importance of these projects and the benefits we’d reap from putting in the time. Had I been able to better quantify the tangibles, it’d probably have had surprisingly different outcomes.
We spent the months of May and June working on some exciting new features for our mobile app and helped launch an improved itinerary planning experience on our core product. In addition, for the first time, we designed a gamification model to promote our recently launched Maldives product. The gamified GTM strategy was exciting, and managed to bring a 1000 active users aboard. The winner of the contest got to enjoy an all expenses paid trip to the Maldives, just for clicking a bunch of buttons! We also helped create many Training videos and print collaterals, to assist our HR in the new hire on-boarding process. It was at this juncture that we also formally made the distinction between each of our functional sub-divisions; product, visual and motion design and chalked out a hierarchy so designers were aware of how their career trajectories could pan out. I’d highly recommend doing this for your teams if you haven’t yet, not because it sounds cool to be a ‘Senior Interaction Designer’, but because it brings about immense clarity to the designers in the team and gives them a tangible goal to march towards. After all, designers are people too..
Things we learned — Measure design impact with the help of well crafted, measurable metrics.
As designers and design leaders, we need to spend a lot more effort on measuring our impact in a quantifiable manner. Whether it be product design or branding, so long as it’s digital, there’s likely a metric to measure its efficacy. I say this because invariably most numbers tend to be about delivery, and while that’s important, we need to stick our necks out for the meatier metrics and take responsibility for our failures and successes alike.
E.g., % achievement of (goal metric x), ∆time spent on new feature, ∆lead growth%
Jul — Aug — Sep
#focusonteam #dailystandups #pytdesignoninsta #designfridays #mapviews #dubaiexperience #visaonapp #helpdeskonapp #emailstandardisation
In the second half of the year we focused a lot on ‘The Design Team’ and grew immensely as a cohesive unit. Early into Q3, we let go of a member, but we put in a nice-ish hiring process and added 3 more incredibly talented designers, who, might I add have made quite a positive impact on the organisation. We started running daily morning stand-ups, setup our own Insta-handle (follow us on @pyt_design), and began hosting ‘Design Fridays’ (DFRIs) — design led exploration sessions to discover new things from open forum talks (we ran 3 DFRIs by the end of 2019, but plan on doing many more in 2020). Generally, we developed a bunch of good habits and it helped us become a much more closer knit team.
Through July and August we designed some killer new product features like, map views and new user authentication models to reduce drop-offs. We introduced a destination specific product experience for Dubai, ran another CRED partnership, created a library of videos for many focus destinations, designed a new help desk, introduced an automated Visa tracking dashboard for our mobile app users, and, made a bunch of changes to the sales handoff process by introducing new workflows in our internal CRM tool. Picking up from where we left the standardisation project, we realised we were spending far too much time on creating new email templates for every new campaign our marketers wanted to run. We were fragmenting our own brand and decided to take on the daunting task of email standardisation. We created a library of templates that we converted to HTML and CSS, and solved this problem. What would take us close to 3 days to complete suddenly got snipped down to a couple of hours, and that to us was real needle pushing work.
Things we learned — Build strong, proactive communication habits to avoid lapses in product development plans.
It’s a beautiful thing when people come together and create. While we had a fairly productive Q3 and grew both physically and metaphorically, collaboration, both inter-team and intra-team seemed to take a backseat. Part and parcel of growing perhaps, but maybe people just need a bit of a prod on how to collaborate with different stakeholders. Having a design-process checklist (which we didn’t) can in fact help you transition as your teams scale, so I’d recommend getting one in place.
Oct — Nov— Dec
#designowners #accountability #streamlinedcomms #projectmanagement #proactivecommunication #icct20 #selfimprovement #crmupgrades #customerresearch #usabilitystudies
I’d argue that Q4 was our best quarter yet, and the quarter with the most learnings too.*Cue Led Zep’s Communication Breakdown*
The first thing we did in Q4 was assign design-owners for our suite of products and services. This helped us build accountability within our team and streamlined communications with other functions. However, I’d recommend you have an efficient communication update mechanism in place before you begin, because shit can go south pretty easily without one. Projects can take unduly long to materialise, sub-par solutions may be proposed or worse even, incredible solutions may fail to see the light of day because of the lack of designer confidence.
During the course of the year, I kept switching back and forth between doing actual design work and doing ops and management related tasks, and I realised every time I was focusing on designing, my feelers on ‘the team’ were getting hazy. This meant I wasn’t really able to be very helpful at a strategic level, or ‘project manage’ very efficiently. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting micromanaging every conversation thread between designers and product/marketing stakeholders, but rather building positive communication habits for seamless design cycles to take shape.
In typical T20 fashion, in October we announced our partnership with the cricketing behemoth, the ICC T20 Cricket World Cup in Australia. For an up & coming travel brand like us, this was a monumental win, and there was a concerted effort in our team to put our best foot forward, pun very much intended.
Q4 saw some other large projects take shape and a lot of them were focussed on self-improvement. We launched a renewed homepage aesthetic, launched a new Travel packages experience, helped push out a more robust CRM experience for our travel consultants, and even conjured up an entire mobile app based purchase experience. Most importantly however, we doubled down on formalised customer research, a long pending goal for us as a team. Designers were now making it a point to meet and run usability studies with walk-in customers every week to better gauge our product’s ease of use. It’s remarkable how customers have the ability to just crush our assumptions, it’s both humbling and hilarious, and I think the best part of being in this wonderful field.
Things we learned — Hand off projects as you would your baby 😆
Often times designers get bogged down by the variance between handed-off prototypes and the subsequent tech output discrepancies from a poor estimation of what’s possible and what isn’t. Scoping projects thoroughly with all stakeholders upfront can help mitigate these discrepancies from lapses in communication. Following an effective project hand-off document can help align developers better with the designer’s motivations.
Here’s to a New Decade
2019 had so much more than I’ve managed to cram in here. Many highs, many lows and many terribly crafted jokes strewn about. And this was just our first year as a team. We developed habits, mostly good ones :) We’re learning to get more business context to stay relevant. We’re growing more empathetic and more curious and we’re surging into the new decade, wiser and full of optimism for our prospects in shaping the way India is going to experience leisure travel in the coming years.
Thanks for tuning in! Good luck, and more power to you in 2020!
Tools we’re currently using
Communication — Slack
File management — Google Drive
Product Design — Figma
Visual Design — Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, Figma
Motion Design — After Effects, Premier Pro
Task Management — Jira, Google Sheets
Energy — Humor, Good ol’ Rajma Chawal
Product Design — Anand Nair, Sandheep S, Mohammed Basith, Prabu Ganesh
Communication Design — Koushik Murali, Magesh, Sasikumar
Motion Design — Denish Niranjan, Amit Choudhary
Design Ops & Stuff— Samudra Gupta
If you’re a designer and looking to join a team with exciting prospects across the design spectrum, do reach out to us on design@pickyourtrail.com. We’re young, we come from varied backgrounds, and we all have a healthy obsession with design. We’re currently looking to fill in the big shoes of a Sr. Brand Designer.
