Valentine’s Day Special with Lara Mendonça (Bumble)
Emotional design is a way of evoking positive emotions in the users and providing a great user experience. How these emotions take shape, depends on factors like aesthetics, usability, emotional connection, user interaction, etc. User interaction helps in understanding the user diversity and their needs, working on which designers can provide immersive experiences. But how can designers use emotional design to articulate positive emotions among the users and provide immersive experiences?
To answer these questions, in this 42nd episode we interact with Lara Mendonça, Head of Product Design at Bumble. With her passion for inclusive and dynamic design, she has been building inclusive and diverse teams and empowering them in designing successful products. She is an expert in design direction and strategy, design operations, mentorship and growth, communication and leadership, and a lot more. Let’s know more about her journey and experiences in the special episode of the “Avantika Designeering Series Podcast”
Rohit Lalwani: Usability is the heart of a good design, but its definition is different for the users. They prefer aesthetics and fancy designs over usable products. For designing an enjoyable user experience there needs to be a balance between all the components of the design. I wish to ask how can designers blend aesthetics, originality, creativity, and usability to create impactful experiences?
Lara: There is a law and a principle of user experience called the aesthetic usability effect, that says that the more aesthetically pleasing something is, the more the user will excuse bad usability. So there is a direct relationship between how aesthetically pleasing something is, to how people feel about the product. Something less useful for a user, would not be perceived by them as their attention is grabbed more by its aesthetics. There is a secret there, there is a middle ground where you are using this principle, you are doing something aesthetically pleasing, but you are also investing in usability. I believe that we do not need to have an ugly design or a super clinical design to achieve maximum usability.
The secret to all of this is to talk to your users. The creative side comes from the designer’s mind.
We do the job of creation and we should not let go of the play of being a designer, to design that clinical cold utilitarian interface. We should still have fun and create things that we like but at the same time, you need to ask yourself, who am I designing this for? This is why you should talk to users and show them and validate with them and try to cover the usability side as well. In the process, you will make some compromises to your visual aspirations, and sometimes you will not be able to do exactly what you want, but as long as you are in the happy middle ground, where you are showing the user an idea of a future, you are showing them something new and exciting, and something which can also be used, and this seems fine and you do not have to go either extreme. A lot of people are successful at that. There are so many products that are interesting and look nice and I still enjoy using them and this is what we should all strive to do.
Rohit Lalwani: My next question is about a love triangle. Innovation has not always been understood as technological and commercial; it is the design that acts as a catalyst for both business and technology.
I wish to know, how can we blend the sensibility of design, the feasibility of the technology, and the strategy of the business to drive innovation?
Lara: The key lies in the question because design in itself is innovation, but no one can build anything alone. Being able to understand products and talk to products similarly, understand the technology, playing and innovating with technology sets us apart and creates innovation. If a designer does not understand how the things he is designing are built, he needs to understand what is react native? What are the kind of native languages that iOS is using, Android is using or the web is using and how do design systems work on the code level, etc?
If one does not understand how those things are built the options are very limited to how one can challenge and evolve them with your team. As designers, we, unfortunately, are in a position where we have to know a little bit about everything because that is how you really bridge that gap.
Similarly with a product, the more we understand each other and this triangle of people who know each other’s capabilities and talents the further they grow. With that, trust the fact that we each bring different things to the table. The more we do this, the better the results are going to be.
Having a great working relationship, but also having the trust to really push it and doing things that are new and risky in a good way, we can achieve something great.
This is the spirit that you should get going into your job about really pushing for a vision of the future and this cannot be done alone; you need to trust your partners.
Rohit Lalwani: This brings me to the last question for you today. At Avantika University, we have coined the term ‘Designeering’ which is the base ideology that we operate on. The blended approach of design and technology coming together. I wish to ask how do you see the blend of design and engineering in your field and process, and what do you think is the impact of this blended approach?
Lara: This approach depends on a lot of things, so I think designers and engineers can be different people or they can be the same person in a company but beyond that, I see a symbiosis between these two practices. So the closer we get to designing such as using tools that design and build at the same time the closer we get to what being an engineer is. Before we used Photoshop, which was very visual-based to sketch, and now we are using Figma and each of those is a step closer to development.
Similarly, developers are using things that are coming and bringing them closer to design. They are understanding what makes design so important and this at the end of the day is changing the field. I love this idea of ‘Designeering’ is a great next step for design because if you take architects as an example, they understand the construction as well as the visual side and living in the interacting side of what they do.
I hope that one day designers can be like that and can own this expertise around how and why things are built and which is the best way to build them. I believe this is great where there is a movement in the industry to push for that.
Head to our “Valentine’s Day Special” episode or tune into Avantika Designeering Series podcast for more information on Design and Technology! Do visit our profile.
