Holistic Approach In Product Design

Olga Mishyna at UXDX Community: Amsterdam. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN24YcRDk8s

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Organizing a holiday for six people

[00:00:09] Hi. Have you ever tried to organize a holiday for six people who live in three different countries? Two couples, one single person, one gluten-free person, a few people who get seasick, a few people who get carsick, some people who want a lazy-style holiday, some people who want to go active sightseeing. You need to think about budgets, who is going to drive, what time you're going to arrive, where you're going to meet. Is it going to be morning flights or evening flights? You'll have to request holidays at work. Are you going to book on Airbnb or Booking.com?

[00:00:50] This is exactly the same issue that we all face at work as designers. I'm going to give a solution for this kind of field [?]. But first, a little bit about myself. My name is Olga. I've worked as a product designer for the past half a year at Adyen. I've been living in Amsterdam for almost four decades [?], and this is what my friends still think I'm doing here. This is what my parents think I'm doing here. This is what I think I'm doing: saving the world, one design at a time. And this is what I'm actually doing on a daily basis: biking through the rain every day.

[00:01:38] I'm going to tell you three stories from experience, and a few takeaways from each of them that I found really useful for myself. I hope they're going to make your life easier too.

Story one: the cargo ship and the speedboat

[00:01:52] Story A is one of my latest adventures, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. This is supposed to be a picture of a giant cargo ship, but this chunky kitty is way cuter. Imagine you're driving this giant cargo ship. You're moving full speed ahead in one direction, and you figure out that you need to turn 180 degrees back. It's going to be really hard. Now imagine you are driving a speedboat. It's going to be way easier.

[00:02:25] My point is that changing the way of working of an individual team is way easier than changing the style of work of an entire company. Starting small, starting low, is easier. Big companies are full of inertia, and startups are so successful because they're like speedboats. They can change their style at any moment; they can change their direction at any moment.

[00:02:53] In this company I was introduced as a UXer to work with two tribes. When I say tribes, I basically mean teams. It's the Spotify model; if you're not familiar with it, google it. It's amazing, and it definitely will make your life better. All my work and all my tasks were incorporated into the ticketing system of the development cycle, and my work became part of the development cycle.

[00:03:22] When I was working with those two different tribes, I figured out that the maturity level of those tribes was different. In the beginning it was a struggle, because it was hard to adapt. But acknowledging the fact that this change would take time, and that it would take effort from both of us, helped us to come to the next level.

[00:03:50] Not everything went great in that company. When business goals take over development goals, and they take over the user goals, things are not going to work out the way you expect them to. That was the moment when I left the company, so I'm really curious to find out how they dealt with it themselves.

[00:04:07] But what I learned from this experience is that you need to invite every team member to user testing. For me it was an enlightenment moment, one of those aha moments when you see what's happening. It happened when we had user testing and we invited the developers. When I saw how they were looking at the users on the screen using their product, they were understanding, at that moment, how important what we're doing is, and how small changes in design can impact that experience. So if you can do this, please do it.

Story two: the development riot

[00:04:45] The second story. I have a code name for it: development riot. Do you like it when strangers tell you what to do? Neither do I, and neither did the people who were working at that bank. At that bank, an external design agency was hired by the board members, and they arrived like a knight in shining armor with their beautiful, shiny solutions, trying to solve all the problems that they were imagining before coming there.

[00:05:21] The problem is they never talked to the team who were working at this bank. They never talked to the developers, and never talked to the designers. They didn't really bother to check with the users what the problems were. So of course things didn't work out the way they were expecting. The solution that they brought raised more questions than it actually answered. And "fresh look" is not really a design requirement, or at least it's not one that you should follow.

[00:05:52] It became a sort of small riot among the developers and the other people who were working there. And you don't really want to have developers as your enemies. Developers should feel excited about the challenge that you're bringing. They should feel ownership of whatever they're going to build, and to feel this ownership they should participate in decision making. This is very important. Otherwise, things are not going to work the way you expect them to.

[00:06:21] So basically what happened? All the deadlines got postponed, and this fresh look change got extended for years. And all the designs that this agency brought got Frankensteined halfway by developers and designers who were trying to gather some ownership over them, and of course they didn't work.

[00:06:48] One thing I learned from this experience: we should listen to Google Ventures. We should run design sprints, and we should involve everyone who is participating in building this product. If you're external, go to the office of your client, sit with everyone in that place, and try to talk to as many people as possible. If you are internal, dedicate time and effort and run a design sprint. It may not answer all the questions that you have, but it definitely will help you ask the right ones.

Communication and a holistic approach

[00:07:28] How is all this related to my holidays? You remember: five people, three countries and all this stuff. Communication. In order to understand what other people think, what they expect us to do and what they need, we need to talk to each other. In my case, when I was trying to organize that holiday, I set up a chat with everyone. By talking honestly and openly to each other about what we wanted from this holiday and what we expected from it, we managed to organize an amazing trip. We're still holding it close to our hearts through the cold winters. That was great.

[00:08:14] Also, we're not telepaths. We cannot know everything, and we cannot read each other's thoughts. So we need to talk to each other. We need to understand the dependencies that we have on all ends of our product. We need to approach our work holistically. The Cambridge Dictionary defines holistic as "dealing with or treating the whole of something or someone and not just a part." Simply, it means that everything is interconnected. We are all building something that is bigger than just one part. We need to contribute, we need to talk to each other, we need to understand each other. This is very important.

Story three: what works at Adyen

[00:08:55] Now to my last experience, at Adyen, which I personally feel is a story of success. What did we do differently? We invite non-designers to design reviews. As everyone else does, of course, we have design reviews where people come, we exchange our designs, give some feedback and align with each other. But sometimes we invite people who are non-designers. It can be product leads, it can be business leads, it can be developers, because they can bring a very great insight into whatever we are doing. They can also understand what kind of work we are doing and give credit to us as well.

[00:09:38] As designers, we are not outsiders. Designers are put at the core of every team. We work together. We set, for example, our annual and quarterly goals all together as a team. Designers are also incorporated into the development process, and developers work closely with designers during the creation process.

[00:10:01] And the most important part, which I feel lies at the core of how Adyen functions: we empower collaboration. What it means in the end is that people talk a lot. It can be a two-minute conversation while you're standing in line for coffee, or it can be a whole-day session where we fly in our colleagues from other offices and spend the entire day working on some problem.

[00:10:31] At Adyen we also have the Adyen Formula, and I would like to showcase only three points from it. The rest you can find on our website. First, we don't hide behind email; instead, we pick up the phone. A two-minute quick call can be way more insightful than exchanging ten emails, because we can say things in a very simple, direct way. We can read our emotions, we can read what we think, we can understand each other. Humans speak; it's great.

[00:11:04] We talk straight without being rude. I think this comes from Dutch culture too; people are quite direct, but we mean it in a good way. If something is great and we like it, people acknowledge it. We'll tell each other, "Hey, you did an amazing job, it works." If something doesn't work, we're also going to say so. After all, we are not fighting over something. We're not enemies; we're working together on something.

[00:11:29] The last one: we include different people to sharpen our ideas. It means that we encourage everyone to come and collaborate with us on the design system. We ask everyone to participate in team planning. We ask people to exchange between their teams.

Takeaways

[00:11:52] My takeaways from this experience so far. Start small. Change people's minds one by one; it will cause a ripple effect. If you start to do something differently within your team, and this brings some success, of course, because you will work better and be more predictable, people will see what is different in your team and they will try to replicate it. The entire company will slowly adopt the process that you are trying to apply.

[00:12:22] Include people with different backgrounds. We are all like unicorns. We possess unique experiences, we possess unique knowledge, and by sharing it with each other we enrich our products. It will make them better from any point of view.

[00:12:42] And a small bonus: don't try to make it perfect from the start. It's an evolution, not a revolution. Of course it's going to be a cycle of failures and successes, but this is the only way you can figure out how your team should function and what your way is to build the best product. Thank you. Now you can go have drinks.