Designing With Ambiguity, Part II: Design Doing, Not Thinking
Prototype often (think by doing).
Product designers, UXers alike, are all familiar with wanting more process and better documentation in hopes of connecting the dots retrospectively. We seek revelation in every analysis. Action for every insight. It’s normal to feel wary about over-generalizations, and immobilized by the possibility of failure. We get stuck in a frenzy of sorting sticky notes and documenting insights, creating decks to offer visibility, maintaining narratives through numbers and charts, and balancing customer empathy with actual feasibility. Furthermore, we get bogged down by process, or stuck ideating “what ifs” until we’re actually not doing all that much designing.
As brands are shifting their strategies towards digital transformation, the demand for design thinking — a methodical approach to creative problem solving often evangelized by the Silicon Valley tech hub — is ever more prevalent. When designing the SSENSE app, however, we drove process forward when we changed our perspective on “design thinking”.
In the face of ambiguity, discussed here in Part I, we learned that our best way of working was to simply dive right in. Rather than weighing our process too heavily on the ‘understand’, ‘define’, and ‘ideate’ phases of the design thinking methodology, we prototyped often. By putting work into the world, we were thinking by doing. This meant spending a significant amount of time in low-fidelity, iterative designs that we could get feedback on easily. We didn’t shy away from launching a beta app to test specific features, such as the product recommendation roulette, and we experimented with live data and user interaction.
While putting a half-baked prototype in front of stakeholders could be a hot potato at times, when demonstrating the intention of entertaining an idea, or initiating conversation around a difficult decision, prototypes are a golden key to stakeholder alignment, polishing rough ideas, and bringing them through to fruition.
Start with small experiments.
“Design thinking” often moves the emphasis away from the actual doing, where designers could be spending more time tinkering and entertaining uncommon themes or patterns. In conceptualizing the SSENSE app, we were in the habit of creating and discarding prototypes, taking small steps toward big ideas.
While the possibility of some concepts were out of scope, our method of learning about customers was to prototype radical ideas for radical insights. In prototyping a chat-focused search feed that recognized image uploads to recommend similar items, we established that a large number of customers are very particular about their choices, especially at specific price points. They paid close attention to attributes like colors, silhouettes, and decorative details from specific brands. For example, customers looking for black boots might avoid the trademark yellow stitching of Dr. Martens, refuse identical silhouettes at the price point of Prada, but will find A.P.C. boots with white stitching acceptable. We began to shift our focus towards machine learning after realizing the significant value it could unlock in terms of the complexities of consumer preferences in luxury fashion.
We also experimented with breaking down interesting interactions found in other apps. When thinking about alternate ways to navigate through our catalog, we looked at the iOS Photos app. While viewing photos one-by-one, users are able to scrub through an album to quickly jump from one point to another. Images flash as the horizontal slider is being dragged. Viewers can quickly scan the contents of an entire album within seconds. Similar to flipping through a book or browsing a clothing rack, the SSENSE app’s product details page mimics this behavior through a ‘roulette’ of recommended products. Like the Photos app, customers are able to browse similar styles in the roulette rapidly without having to scroll down the page, or navigate back.
Prototype for validation, not delivery.
User experience design is very much a practice that requires us to ‘think by doing’. Meaning, being intentional about the time spent in low-fidelity, unpolished work. Getting hands-on in the spirit of play. For us, rapid prototyping was our main method of play. We used various fidelities (ie. paper prototyping, Figma click-throughs, Principle animations) depending on the hypotheses we wanted to confirm. It helped dispel doubts about how users would behave by being able to work through questions that really stumped us, like “is opting into favourite designers to build accurate recommendations necessary?”. We tested this concept vigorously in several prototypes, and eventually with real time customer data in an internal beta app.
It was revealed that recommendations with little input or direction were preferred. Our customers actually hold a significant amount of trust in our curation culture, thus reflected in an openness to receive recommendations based on recency and organic browsing. Interestingly, they more so feared missing out on opportunities to discover gems or emerging brands.
With rough prototypes on hand, we were able to quickly turn to our neighbor to ask “what do you think of x behavior or interaction?”. This feedback was quick, low-cost, and helped us work through problems, or further develop an idea. All in all, when time is spent to play, test, and iterate on concepts, teams move forward with more decisiveness and clarity.
Connect the dots, but not all of them.
There were times we went down rabbit holes and lost sight of the bigger picture in a frenzy of ideas. This could unnecessarily draw out any ideation phase, when sometimes the best action is to sum up your findings and carry on in a direction. One of the most challenging aspects of synthesis is knowing what to do with an overwhelming amount of feedback from prototypes and user sessions. Not every learning is an insight, not every insight is actionable, and not every action is feasible within a constrained scope. Rather than connect all the dots, we had to figure out which dots NOT to connect.
As designers who are compelled to fix things, we want to be able to retrace our steps, and land back at the initial values — the “why?” factor — driving us to solve a problem. However, in designing the app, we also learned that it’s important to take a stance on the experience we wanted to deliver from the SSENSE point-of-view.
For example, hyper-personalization was a key experience we wanted to deliver to increase the affordability of discovery (in the mobile context). Since recommendations were driven by organic browsing behavior, customers would occasionally see brands they would never shop from. We received some feedback suggesting that we should offer customers a way to ‘clear’ unwanted recommendations, thereby adjusting our algorithm via direct user input. However, from our point-of-view, we decided NOT to connect this dot. SSENSE is recognized for its distinctive buying direction by way of brand and product offerings, exclusive capsule collections, ecommerce styling, etc. By allowing customers to execute their own inputs, we were detracting from our values of data-driven discovery and curation. Instead, we took a stance on how customers should experience shopping at SSENSE, approaching user experience as brand experience in this moment.
In Summary
It’s only the beginning and already we’re in a hyper iterative mode. Our team is constantly thinking about behaviors that need polishing, or pixels that need some love and attention. Having launched our SSENSE app last month, there are multiple features we are excited to work on and deliver. The only way we could truly assess how we were doing was by going live — to obtain the feedback necessary to grow, create tangible value for customers, measure our successes, and continue to iterate. So far, we’ve exceeded expectations for our global targets and the responses since going live have been overwhelmingly positive. Like most product cycles, while the SSENSE app will perpetually remain a work in progress, it has already paved the way for an exciting future of new omni-channel experiences for SSENSE.
Download the app from the app store now and let us know what you think.
Editorial reviews by Max Kaplun, Deanna Chow, Liela Touré & Prateek Sanyal.
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