Unique design may kill your product
For the past three years of working with startups (caviar fastbite, itsfairy, rove.me, pure, toast and more) my workflow changed dramatically. There are no more final polished deliverables that are just sent to developers one day and then I got paid.
Everything changes with the business you are working with as it grows and adapts, design changes happen all the time. My “great ideas” fail and I start tracking and thinking of design I’m providing based on statistics. As a team, we may go for considered risk and test ideas weekly. Failing is good, and it helps to evolve. What is bad is when failing cost too much. Designers who are too focused on uniqueness may hurt a lot.
This post is about how to get your designer ego step back for a greater cause.
Resources are limited
Most successful services are those where people get what they want faster and cheaper, services with great customer support. Some top players make value proposition that reshapes whole industries (Uber, Airbnb). Gamification and amazing interactions that we see on Dribbble every day has nothing to do with chances to succeed.
Almost. It may play a supporting role, but it’s a luxury for those who have enough resources or knows it’s essential for the service (usually it’s not) so it should be done on early stages.
As designers we are tended to fall into details, often minor. Every day while working on commercial projects I fight a temptation to make some interactions or elements that are not standard but basically do the same as those existing familiar approaches people are used to. It’s time for self-criticism, asking yourself (or a team) a question: “How is it better compared to conventional solution for this situation?”. If the answer shows it’s better than next question should be: “Does it worth it with our current resources, is this essential for Service and Clients?”.
Making unique or trendy custom interactions is the less complicated thing in making a smooth experience, but it eats your time and budget.
That may not be a matter of celebration if client approves your interaction idea, you may just make him more harm than good. There are lots of developers used to designers that provide them “unique” ideas, and they just develop them, cause “anything can be done”.
Good product designer knows the boundaries well. Thinking within a simple/classic interaction paradigm will bring you to the point when you start thinking more about service values.
Most people who work on product design starting from pre-seed or seed rounds know how valuable resources (time/people/money) are. How any additional workdays of development hurt. From my practice, I usually urge clients not to make any custom errors or alerts for mobile platforms. All native (still thought-out), it will save a tremendous amount of time to support while scaling to other platforms and updating versions. Ease of design support is extremely important, this is the problem that non-conventional approach designs face in later development.
Look for tools that speed you up
Main reason I use Sketch now is speed. It saved me hundreds of work hours. I think This is also one of the reasons Sketch is now so popular in the US compared to Europe, where things are going much slower.
Invision is fast, it’s limited in interactions and not flexible in scenarios. It may bring problems sometimes, but I find it faster for today’s development process than Axure (which is better for complex systems). Invision does not allow me to play with interactions, and I appreciate that.
Experiment and try out new concepts. But not on clients cost.
It’s all a part of self-development. Once your clients/products grow they’ll have more resources, you can start providing those ideas if there will be a need to. Knowing framer.js or similar is a great thing, play around and upload to dribbble:)
