How I made the most of my Professional Development in 2020
Each year, Laterpay is gracious enough to provide us with a budget for our professional development. In 2019, I was fortunate enough to use the majority of it to attend a conference. Although I hoped to do that again, early in 2020 it became clear that attending an in-person-conference was not in the cards. As I wracked my brain to try to determine how to put this budget to the best use, I decided it would be helpful to learn more about the design process.
As a Product Manager, I often work closely with designers and I find this subject fascinating; however, I didn’t know much about it. After doing my research, I decided to work towards an Interaction Design Certificate from the University of California San Diego. Seven courses and one capstone project later, I’ve made it and I’m here to tell you about what I have learned!
Design Is About Solving a Problem, Not About How Something Looks
Throughout the course, the primary point that was driven home was that good design is about finding and solving a user need. The majority of the work is investigative and only the last few pieces involve making your solution look nice — despite the fact that making things visually appealing is what most people associate with “good design.”
The final course in the specialization was putting together a capstone project. In this project, each student was able to identify their own problem and, over the course of 10 weeks, work towards solving that problem.
At the time of selecting our topics, we were in the midst of the US presidential election. This led me to choose the problem of misinformation in the news. Is Hunter Biden’s laptop a smoking gun that proves corruption, or is it just the laptop of someone who works internationally? It felt impossible to tell. Another problem highlighted by The Social Dilemma and exacerbated by the US election is the increased levels of groupthink caused by our digital lifestyles. These two factors inspired me to try to find a way to clearly show multiple sides to popular topics so that individuals can make their own, informed, decisions.
Now that I had my “problem,” it was time to get started. The course walked us through the design process, building along our theme each week to help drive each step home. From need-finding and ideation to prototyping and performing heuristic evaluations, we covered it all, including new rounds of testing each week. But surprisingly, we didn’t “pretty things up” until the last two weeks of the project, really driving home the point: how something works matters more than how it looks.
Solving Problems Is Hard
The second key take-away for me was that solving problems is hard. As a Product Manager I already knew this to be true but going through the process from a designer’s perspective reinforced this truth even more. As I went through this process for my capstone project, two distinct views emerged: those who primarily get their news from social media and those who get their news from other sources. As I discovered in the prototyping phase, these two groups have very different needs. As the weeks progressed, we worked through storyboards (below), paper prototypes, and finally a digital prototype all the while refining to ensure that I was solving the primary problem of helping people make informed conclusions even when provided with biased information. This is not a quick process and, as the foundation of the product, is imperative to get right.
Always Keep the User in Mind
However, it is not enough to simply solve the problem. Another important lesson that I learned is that you have to solve the problem for your user. For my capstone project, I chose to focus on users who get their news from non-social-media sites. I decided to solve the problem of bias in the news by showing multiple news articles side-by-side, so that it would be easier to see multiple sides to the same story and form your own conclusion. However, one of my early prototypes, shown below, does this in a layout that only really works on a computer. After talking to more “users” I discovered that the majority of them would consume news on their phone so I had to go back to the drawing board.
Test, Test, Test
My final key takeaway was the value of testing. Due to the pandemic, I was limited in the number of people I could perform in-person tests with. However, I was still able to get valuable feedback each time! I went through paper prototypes with my husband, did socially-distanced interviews with neighbors, and for our final round of testing, tested with strangers via UserTesting.com. Each round of feedback provided new insights and gave me input into what my “users” were thinking. Now I am even more inspired to test Laterpay with our users in the new year.
Conclusions
In the end, I have a prototype of a customizable news site which aggregates articles from various sources. It groups three articles on each topic, the primary article from a typically unbiased source, one article from a conservative source and one from a more liberal source. Each source also has a “bias indicator” to help the reader understand the inherent bias in what they are reading to help inform their own conclusions.
I also have an even deeper respect for our Laterpay design team and hopefully have learned how to provide them with the information they need to help us succeed in making a truly user-centric product. Professional development for the win!
