Product design requires choreography, improvisation, bolts of inspiration, and discipline. Balancing these inputs takes someone who’s attuned to the team, business, and customer needs simultaneously. The work below shows how my teams achieved that.
Product design cycles involve so many moving parts. Each effort requires clear objectives, space for exploration, unique skills, and coordination between other efforts. This process is rarely linear but does have structure based on some core principles. The diagram captures some of the basic, interdependent activities I think about when shaping projects.
Below is a selection of work that illustrates the typical phases involved in my product design and problem solving process.
Research & Ideation
Build the right thing … this is the foundation of product design. It involves hearing the customer’s voice, collecting empirical evidence, defining priorities, and developing plans to test hypotheses.
The projects I’m involved with are always grounded in and derive inspiration from research. That may include survey data, analytics, interviews, user testing, contextual inquiries, or real time data collected from established customer feedback loops. These efforts can be as formal or informal as needed, but the continuous inputs help inform direction. While the raw data is never an answer in itself, synthesizing and interpreting it with user needs in mind helps align teams and set priorities.
Research synthesis is a chance to identify, assess, and think broadly about how to approach the challenge at hand. The process of reporting and reflecting often doubles as early stage ideation—where a team can see the limits and opportunities associated with an eventual solution.
Conceptual workflows, IA, content strategy, wires, lo-fi prototyping, early design concepting … this is where the analytical meets the creative and the real fun starts. I think of this phase as DNA creation—a critical period where a product’s character and functionality are defined. This never really ends but there are different points during a product’s lifecycle where a team gives this considerable focus.
Prototype & Design
Design gives tangible form to an idea. At this stage, thoughts are shaped for sharing, usage, critique, and testing. There’s still room for considerable discovery while aesthetic and interactive patterns are defined.
While developing a new visual language, it’s critical to explore as many different opportunities during this period of flexibility. Defining this “North Star” approach as part of a CX overhaul for a retirement savings provider involved considerable testing and iteration—learning which components worked with each other and which ones users responded to most positively.
Once a direction is set, it’s time to explore possibilities and delve deeply into specific problems. Prototyping allows everyone to think 3-dimensionally about an app, experiencing how components work with one another, and how a sequence of interactions flows together … or doesn’t. Xfinity Mobile intended to differentiate based on a best-in-class CX. That meant every aspect of the buy, account management, and support experience had to feel frictionless.
This new HR analytics platform was designed with a clear purpose: provide executives and managers with easily interpretable data visualizations that surface actionable insights. A major component of the design system involved the creation of a data viz library with an accessible color palette, visualization conventions, and defined graphs and data presentation models. Beyond the components working together visually, they needed to tell compelling stories when placed in proximity with each other.
A new product entering an established market needs to quickly differentiate itself. Introducing a service that feels like a mature experience helps breed confidence in new customers. Getting to that point with Xfinity Mobile required significant ideation, testing, revision—while taking calculated risks balancing convention and innovation.
Despite the rigor, design can and should still be fun. Creating this concept for a digital properties redesign of a renowned Philadelphia museum allowed us to do both. Thorough research informed a design approach that served the needs of multiple user types and, most importantly, reflected the whimsy and awe inspired by the museum experience.
Validate, Build & Release
Build the thing right … product design is not a linear process and there’s definitely no end to it. There are, however, critical milestones and releases that allow a team to evaluate process and measure success. Responding properly to those insights can propel a team forward.
Design is a process of evolution, not a finish line. On my teams we’re looking to validate or disprove hypotheses through regular testing. We shape product roadmaps that balance innovative thought and input from established feedback loops. The desire for continuous improvement creates a thirst to gather insights in the most valuable way throughout the product lifecycle.
To remain agile and accommodate the degree of change a modern product requires during stages, my teams have embraced the development of design systems that follow the principles of atomic design. This strengthens collaboration between design and development teams leading to rapid builds, regular enhancements, and a predictable method for adding new features.
As teams scale, a design system is only as good as its adoption and usability. We aim to make sure a product can be maintained, iterated upon, and enhanced in a fluid way, avoiding seismic disruptions for the entire team as much as possible. This goes far beyond “designers” and involves dev, content strategy, marketing, legal, multiple business units, and initiative owners throughout an organization. Creating accessible and maintainable documentation that aligns an organization is the secret sauce that brings everything together.
Maintain & Enhance
There’s a certain energy and passion naturally associated with a new initiative. But the lifecycle of a good product should be long. Maintaining that engagement as a product matures is critical, though it requires a different approach and set of motivators.
Just as research and empirical testing is important during early-stage product development, this remains the lifeblood that propels a product team forward. Identifying pain points or areas for optimization provide real challenges to solve and outcomes that can be measured. When done properly, this is also a key source for ideas around product innovation that can influence the roadmap.
As a system matures and a team scales, I’ve seen how documentation becomes more important. This is often a catch-22 though given the competing needs for clear standards on the one hand, and flexibility to grow and adapt a product rapidly on the other. We’ve addressed this in many ways depending on the needs of a particular team or project. Here we see an example from Wharton, a more stable and timeless brand where traditional “static” documentation was appropriate to ensure that guidelines are consistently followed across a large—sometimes disjointed—organization.
Lately I’ve worked on an in-house project, “productizing” Think Company’s own website. This has included building a team and coordinating activities across the organization to clearly define service offerings, replatform the site to support iterative growth, redefine the brand aesthetic, create a multi-year roadmap that aligns with company strategy, produce content at scale, and regularly develop new features. This effort has encapsulated much of what’s described above including organizational alignment, SEO, testing, and DesignOps.