My Process
Having deep experience working with diverse clients, I've developed a scalable approach to systems design
1. Discovery & Research
Aligning business, user, and team objectives, as well as gathering data to influence design.
2. Prototype & Design
From testing assumptions and iteration, to developing a cohesive design system.
3. Launch & Iterate
Rolling out designs and driving iterations through ongoing conversations.
1. Discovery & Research
The first step to solving a problem is having clarity and coming up with a plan of action that the users, stakeholders, and team are aligned on—before designing or building anything.
Aligning Business, User, and Team Objectives
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
Whether product strategy stems from user feedback or a gap in the market, a product rollout depends on a healthy alliance of users, stakeholders, and teams working toward a unified goal.
Business Goals
I seek to understand business goals by partnering closely with leadership and conducting stakeholder interviews, always striving to better understand the underlying why and not just the what or the how.
Not only does the challenge become more tangible, but it makes it easier to translate the mission to the team.
Team Alignment
I gather input from all team leads who are working on the initiative so we can create a single source of truth. Team alignment is maintained through digital proximity, sustained focus, and ongoing, transparent dialogue.
One of the most beneficial activities for a product design team when undertaking a new initiative is to identify constraints by inviting perspectives from all relevant parties that will be contributing toward the success of the project. Additionally, communicating initiatives company-wide invites both, long-buried and fresh perspectives. What will you uncover?
Gathering Data to Influence Design
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
While it's easy (and fun) to attack a problem head on, we must first make sure the team has a clearly defined scope and timeline to work against.
User Research
Design and product partners validate assumptions with the user base along the way by conducting user research. My favorite way of gathering information is to simply invite users to a conversation.
There are several ways to facilitate this—the tried and true one-on-one interviews, or by creating Advisory Councils, which are intimate, periodically-scheduled (usually quarterly) meetings with respective product leads as well as a select group of users.
In Advisory Councils, users take on a partner-level responsibility in the in an ongoing stream of product-area discussions, initiatives, and iterations.
Aside from being able to have a clear line of communication with users, building and growing a research repository is beneficial for the design and product teams to access user insights to back up their design decisions.
Product Roadmap
Takeaways surfaced from competitive analyses, user, stakeholder, and team interviews give us guidance for coming up with a few possible solutions to the problem.
After gathering research and feedback, design, engineering, and product teams come up with a clear scope of work on a single solution and outline a roadmap.
Information Architecture
At a 30-thousand-foot level, pen meets paper to establish a hierarchical diagram that establishes requirements, priorities, the sitemap, and userflows.
Zooming in closer, the sitemap is broken down into wireframe sketches that include page details that establish connections between how each flow feeds into the rest.
One of my strengths is being able to design for microinteractions, while maintaining a high-level perspective of the entire experience.
2. Prototype & Design
After having a clear understanding and a sound approach, we roll up our sleeves to build a functional prototype while gathering feedback, making iterations, and getting closer to launch of the actual product.
Testing Assumptions & Gathering Feedback
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
In today's competitive market, going from a design to a functional prototype shouldn't take months or years, but weeks (sometimes days or even hours).
I believe in elegant simplicity, using existing frameworks to build on top of, as well as leveraging partnerships to solve problems quickly instead of building and upkeeping proprietary solutions.
Of course, this isn't always possible, but for the sake of testing and validation, a minimal viable product (MVP) is a must.
Interactive Prototype
Giving users something to play with as soon as possible is one of my primary objectives. Assumptions can be crushed or validated, and this step is critical for rapid iterations that lead to a timely product launch.
Users will feel heard, empowered, and inspired. Ideas that didn't exist before will freely flow—this is where magic is created.
Usability Testing
Usability testing with users, stakeholders, and team provides the best opportunity to identify problems, uncovering opportunities and learning about user behavior and preferences.
During this step, we continue to calibrate our approach to align with how users are actually interacting with our product, instead of how they thought they would.
Developing a Cohesive Design System
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
The skeleton has been built, and now it's time to put some meat on the bone.
Over my 15 years as a digital experience and product designer, I have spent a lot of time coming up with the best workflows for converting static designs into functional products.
I have experience with the waterfall method (handing design files over to a developer), as well as creating "redlines" (tediously speccing out every aspect of a flat design file that a developer can reference during their build).
Having conducted over four hundred workshop hours dedicated specifically to teaching designers cutting edge user experience and front-end development practices so they can turn their ideas into reality, I believe the following approach is the future:
Every designer should have functional knowledge of front-end development.
Having this basic understanding of semantic HTML/CSS, translates to cleaner design file output—one that scales across design teams using a unified component language and leads to a more mature design system.
Visual Design Direction
I love fostering collaboration among designers to come up with the best possible solution. I create working environments in which people feel absolutely comfortable sharing their ideas.
In fact, "bad" ideas are a part of the process!
There really are no bad ideas (as long as you don't settle)—only ideas that lead to better ideas, sourced from the whole team while fostering champions of design.
Identity System
Brand equity gets built on top of a sound identity system and is as unique to a product as a person's fingerprint.
Brands give off emotion, whether by design or not. And it's our jobs as designers to produce feelings of positive emotion with a identity system that's consistent throughout all brand communications and touch points.
Component System
HTML/CSS fluency (or even awareness) enables designers to create visual component elements that make it easy for engineers to build out functionality/components quickly through simple "dragging-and-dropping".
Having these semantic, "live" component elements at their disposal allows engineers (and even designers!) to build pages out at a fraction of the time, all while creating a more design-consistent product.
These live component elements seamlessly scale across all web platforms, as well as viewport sizes (desktop, tablet, and mobile).
3. Launch & Iterate
Once the latest iteration meets our design standards, it's time to procedurally roll it out to users and gather real world data that will drive future pivots and design decisions.
Rolling Out the Design
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
I have experience launching products live to millions of users, as well as creating experimental MVPs to test assumptions—either way, I believe in agile iteration and constant communication between product and users.
Agile iterations build the highest quality relationship with users and creates the most sustainable working environments.
Constant communication provides a pulse on what users like and don't like, providing key insights that fuel the product roadmap. Oftentimes, the best ideas come from the users themselves—they'll feel grateful to have been heard and will feel invested in the success of the product.
Quality Assurance
Given the state of digital product development, building a product sometimes feels like building a house of cards—many components, visual and technical, are tied to others. So, by changing one thing, it will likely affect others.
Having a quality assurance process enables the team to run through the product in depth, testing various use cases and workflows, while doing so on various devices. This allows the team to catch bugs in time and release a solid product iteration.
I am a believer that each member of a pod should conduct QA, from each of their own perspectives. Each pod would also benefit from a dedicated QA resource.
A/B Testing
Between product, design, engineering, and marketing, great ideas are likely in abundance. This can be on visual design, marketing copy, as well as UX functionality.
One of the better ways to test assumptions pertaining to "face-value" decisions would be through setting up A/B tests.
It's always a good idea to run A/B tests, since one option always outperforms the other—wouldn't you like to know which?
Launching a design Update
There are two ways to roll out a design update. One could be en-masse—the old way of doing it—where a redesign is kept behind closed doors for months until it is perfected (no such thing). Then, one day, a user logs in, and something they've been so accustomed to for so long has now completely changed.
The other way—the right way—is to roll out a redesign through rapid iterations. These iterations are rolled out in small chunks, to smaller subsets of users (if possible), allowing them to get acclimated with the changes, a few at a time.
This also allows the product team to gather feedback and roll out bug fixes without tainting the entire user pool.
This isn't always possible, and sometimes the entire codebase needs to be updated, and the UI to be updated with it. In instances like these, get the users involved in the design process itself. Keep them updated throughout the process by sharing your plan, and get feedback on wireframes and the UI.
Creating champions out of users should be standard practice for all product teams, regardless whether the entire product is getting a facelift or just a feature rollout.
Rapid iterations allow users to feel heard, and allow the product to solve for real needs, instead of operating on assumptions without validation.
Driving Iterations through Ongoing Conversations
Hearsay Systems design team offsite in San Diego. Photo by Vitaliy Gnezdilov
Work doesn't end at launch. Gathering feedback through constant communication with users and stakeholders continues to drive the product roadmap.
Despite the commonly used term "sprint", product design feels more like a marathon and should be paced accordingly to avoid burnout.
Qualitative Data
All product feedback is valuable. Not only from users, stakeholders, and your immediate team, but also from social media, marketing, sales, customer support, and community support teams.
Every contributor to the larger company has a unique perspective to the overall mission through their own conversations with users, and their feedback should be collected and discussed.
These unique perspectives could be on industry-specific gaps, competition, and general user sentiments.
Quantitative Data
Every new product enhancement is an opportunity to acquire new users and to support existing ones in the customer lifecycle.
Having access to quantitative data is a great way of getting to know how the product is being used. For example, when considering a onboarding process redesign at CBS Sports Fantasy, having data sets on how users are using the product allowed our team to decide what features to include and exclude in the redesign:
For example, we learned that giving users the ability to customize their leagues only until after they completed account creation was the best way to reduce onboarding fatigue and increase retention of new signups.
Continunous Improvements
If a project makes it this far, congratulations! 🎉
And in many ways, this is only the beginning of the product design journey.
The practice of frequent, yet digestible improvements to the product is a cost-effective approach which puts user experience at the heart of the design process—where it belongs.
There is no such thing as perfection. In a world that's constantly in motion—where status quo does not exist—product design teams must adopt a lean, nimble, and iterative process for creative problem solving.