Product Design. Setup and Process Intro
The meaning of Product Design varies a lot from company to company. Regardless of the setup in a specific team, it is essential to agree early on the roles, responsibilities and processes between Product Designers, Product Managers, Engineers and other functions. Transparent expectations help avoid misunderstandings and create harmonious working relationships. At Payoneer Germany, we came up with a set of slides that describe the Role and Process of our Product Design team. It’s our internal crash course in UX. I believe it could be helpful not only for fellow designers and product leaders but also for everyone in the company, as Users can Experience products through many touchpoints.
Have fun reading, and please please please share your feedback! It is an ongoing work-in-progress. I always look (and find) for blind spots and ways to improve.
In our specific team setup and context of this article, the terms UX and Product designer are used as synonyms. UX designer also fulfils roles of UX researcher and UI designer, owning the entire design cycle.
The role of User Experience
The Goal of User Experience is to create a solution that allows Users to solve specific problems, while the user flow is intuitive and the user’s effort is minimised.
UX includes what users see, read, and interact with throughout all touchpoints. UX makes all functional parts perceived by a User as a Holistic System.
It’s important to distinguish user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is a significant part of the design.
Team setup: Cross-functional product teams
Teams are formed around specific Product domains, including Product Manager, Product Designer, Engineering manager, and Engineers. UX Designer owns the entire design cycle from discovery to delivery, UX solution and strategy of her product area.
Working in the same context for an extended period allows developing field expertise and product intuition, which allows solving problems more effectively and with better quality.
Product-Design-Engineering Roles
What we build — we are in this together.
I must confess, I have stolen this slide (and some other ideas) from Paul Adam’s presentation who was a big inspiration for me during the last years. We are all in this together, every team has a role that is important for the business success. And eventually, everyone works with everyone.
Before thinking about a solution, define and understand the root problem
We run discovery to define, understand and prioritise What problem we are trying to solve and Why.
Discovery often takes more time than work on a solution. It is fine. UX design works closely with Product Managers, Business and Tech, taking users’ perspective.
Double diamond process
Dual-Track Agile Methodology
The design process is neither linear, nor it’s consistent. A Designer, as well as her partner in crime, a Product Manager, may work on multiple problems in parallel, running an early discovery, monitoring the performance of a freshly released product, delivering assets to engineers and strategizing on the big picture.
Discovery and thinking about the problem takes most of the design time. Solving the wrong problem is an expensive mistake. Designers also iterate tirelessly. Before coming up with a final solution that goes to production, we experiment and try out dozens of alternative solutions. Most of them end up in junk, but the learnings are precious. It is much cheaper to make mistakes during the design phase, rather than after developing and releasing a floppy product.
Clarification: I only listed research technics that are actively practised in our team and work well for our product types. There are many more practices on the market.
When the problem is defined, understood and prioritised, we can start thinking about a solution.
Experience Architecture:
User Journeys, User Flows and Experience Maps
User Journey is a linear high-level process describing the overall experience with a product. It may include business roles, stakeholders and extra resources are involved.
User flow is a more detailed series of steps a user takes, what parts of the product they interact with. They may be in the form of a mind map or UI examples.
Experience map represents users’ experience within a product — their goals, needs, time spent, thoughts, feelings, reactions, anxieties, expectations.
Product and Information Architecture
A Product Map is a visually organised model of all the product parts. It represents the organisation of the Product Functionality and Content.
Ideation and Concept draft
All products start with Low Fidelity Wireframes. They are the basic drafts that represent interface and functionality concepts showing what goes where but exclude details and visual style.
It is important to stay on low fidelity to focus on the problem, not pretty UI. Introducing distracting details too early may diverge conversations to irrelevant topics, such as discussing the shade of buttons or precise wording
Interactive Prototypes
Prototypes save a ton of time and money — they demonstrate how things will work in an actual use case scenario, and allow for rapid design iteration and user testing.
Solution validation and iteration
We use a number of research methods and tools to validate our solutions. If they are still in the design phase, we may go for user interviews and testing, these can be internal users, actual users or specially recruited testers. When the products are developed and live, we may watch sessions recordings, get usability analytics, collect user feedback or run surveys.
Roadmap planning
The design process is not linear, often there are multiple discoveries and delivery tracks happening in parallel. Design should have an overview of -short, mid- and long-term plans to make sure everything moves in the right direction and fits the big picture
In planning sessions designer confirms the feasibility and constraints, breaking down solutions on smaller deliverable packs (MVP, v1, v2 etc), delivery scoping, effort estimating.
Visual and UI Design
Visual design is the last step before handoff to developers and the phase where a style guide and final specs are crafted. It’s not just about “making things pretty,” but an opportunity to define, or implement a brand colour scheme and affect usability with the layout, contrast, and visual hierarchy.
We try to keep the toolbox minimal and do not invest in re-inventing wheels. We were rather late adopters of Figma but we don’t look back, it replaces many tools and saves us a lot of time. We also give access to Figma files to Product and Engineering colleagues and invite them to collaborate, or explain how to find necessary materials quickly.
There is no shame in using professional UI libraries, such as Material UI. After all, we are a Product Company solving difficult problems, not reinventing buttons and toggles. It would be naive to think we could do better work than Google creating a UI library from scratch, and win in the process. It would be curious to calculate how much developer- and designer- hours MUI has saved us.
The same thinking is behind of choosing the Font Awesome as an icon set.
There is also a product-specific design system (organisms on top of UI library), we maintain and improve it religiously. Design System is a library of re-used components, patterns and layouts. All reusable UI blocks are called components, when there are changes made to a master component, all its instances can be updated quickly.
Customer Delivery, supporting materials
A designer makes sure that supporting documentation is represents the product correctly and accessible to a user at the right moment (e.g. from a relevant product page or email). Design contributes to documentation and marketing materials with high-quality visuals, reviews the content, considers it in user flow design, and tests with users.
Rinse and repeat.
There is no universal all-size-fit-all design process. Different products on different stages may benefit from spending more or less time on every step. Sometimes we spend months in discovery, sometimes it’s purely about a delivery, but most of the time, we need to balance it all. Share what good or bad practices you use, and we can learn from them!
