Pair Design in practice

How we designed a new itinerary concept by working as a pair.

Tom Kupka
UX Collective

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Let’s face it, Pair-design is not really a common method 😲 (at least not in the product teams where I’ve worked so far). However, in my experience, it can be very beneficial, especially when solving complex problems with tight deadlines. It pays off to involve two brains working simultaneously. The method is definitely not a recipe for everything, but it has its place in the designer’s toolkit.

The context of our challenge

Shaping the travel industry with virtually interlined carriers brings us a lot of new challenges at Kiwi.com. You can travel from A to B, combining various means of travel ✈️ 🚌 🚋 together with 3rd party services into a single experience.

Or business is so specific that our tribe is crafting a homegrown customer support platform. We help our~2,000 globally-located agents by making their jobs easier and more effective so that they can focus on providing outstanding service to our customers.

We design for several user roles, including front office travel agents and various back-office roles like booking and claims agents. Each role has a different workflow, process, KPIs, needs, and circumstances of use to do their jobs.

How might we help our agents to see the most relevant information about the customer’s trip?

💪 We needed to come up with a new concept for the multimodal itinerary for our agents.

The itinerary that our passengers need to see is a guide that provides the necessary information about the trip, including the departure time, from, to, flight number, airport name, etc.

Trip summary from a passenger’s point of view.

However, the focus of customer support is a bit broader. Our agents need to see much more information to support our customers, including the following:

  • Timeline: chronological trip view from a passenger’s perspective
  • Reservation details
  • Payments
  • Trip history: schedule changes, itinerary modifications, etc.
Trip itinerary from our customer support’s point of view.

How we paired up 🚀

Before the project to design the itinerary even started, Andrej Kiripolsky, our researcher joined me to help with some tasks. I was temporarily overloaded, and Andrej had some past experience with the design, so it was a great fit.

Later, after we kicked the project off, we realized that we jumped into pair-design quite naturally. 🙃

What is Pair Design in a nutshell?

Pair Design is a bit different from the other ways that design is practiced. It is a method with rules of how the game is played. Here’s some basic info to get you started, the rest you’ll learn from our story.

✌ Two principles

  1. Working together, closely — the core principle is to have two brains on a project at the same time. It’s about deep collaboration, not just occasional feedback and critique.
  2. Role division — the second principle is to define a clear role for each member. At Cooper, they called these roles Gen & Synth, which stand for Generator and Synthesiser.
All kinds of roles can pair. Illustrations by Pablo Stanley at The Design Team

Popular culture is filled with examples of famously successful creative pairs, and it’s no wonder: they combine complementary skills, experience, and perspectives to produce great work — Cooper.

How did our design process look?

As you are familiar with the standard design process, I guess you might wonder how it should be when working in pairs.

By using the itinerary example, I’ll describe what happened at each stage.

The conceptual diagram illustration inspired by Cooper

Research & sense-making

There was a lot to discover about how our agents interact with an itinerary in our legacy systems that grew organically with the startup.

We asked questions like what kind of information is needed, and why? For whom and in which context? And so on. To identify our design opportunities, we needed to learn what the current pains are.

I have to say that retrospectively, I see this phase as the most valuable. We were literally chopping out of the start-up jungle.

💪 Our challenge

  • Dealing with multiple user roles, various needs, and context.
  • Being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of available information.

Let’s have a look at how working in pairs helped us to go through that.

Andrej leading the interview with Adriana (our agent), and Tom taking notes.

Our roles were quite similar in the research and sense-making part of the design process. We worked together to prepare and conduct the interviews. As we tried to get the most from our strengths, we split our roles for the preparation part. Andrej prepared the interview, and I provided feedback. However, we worked simultaneously on conducting the interviews. Andrej, an experienced researcher, led the interview, and I was a passive observer and took the notes that he couldn’t while he was speaking or framing the additional questions.

💡Specify a leader for each interview — participants might feel uncomfortable being “interrogated” by two people.

The benefit in this stage is that you gain a shared understanding of users’ problems as well as the domain you are exploring. You learn very fast, and you always have a buddy that you can cross-check a specific finding that you might not be sure about.

Four ears 👂👂+👂👂 hear more than just two.

Second, it brought us an actionable understanding of the problems to be solved, and this benefit paid off many times in the following stages. The reason is that there is no need of a hand over between research and design — we both had first-hand insights and a clear understanding of what to do.

During our later iterations, we sought feedback from users on our early designs. We needed to validate the content blocks with the domain experts. As our primary goal was to show the necessary pieces of information for each user role, we prepared specific usability testing focused on specific tasks — e.g. booking a flight, providing information to the customer, and so on.

Sketching and wireframing

Once we felt we had enough of an understanding of the problems we needed to tackle, we moved on to the ideation phase.

This was the most fun part, as here the most heated debates happened. We ⚔️ argued a lot. The arguments helped us to agree on the same language, make sure so we were both are on the same page, and most of all we made sure that we covered the big picture together with important details.

💪 Our challenge

  • Unsure about what information really matters, for whom, the context, etc.
  • The same things often had more names, and it created unnecessary noise in our communication.
Tom sketching in the ideation phase.

Let me explain.

Our roles became more distinct in this phase. Here comes a more significant difference in what Gen and Synth do.

The Gen leads the concept creation, comes up with ideas and materializes them for further discussions. Synth leads the concept of evolution. That means asking questions, raising concerns, connecting existing concepts, keeping Gen on the ground and keeping things realistic.

💡Remember to switch roles to get unstuck — we did switch roles, mostly when one of us got tired or just when we felt a lack of ideas, etc. Simply make this work for you so you can keep moving forward.

The benefit of working in pairs in this stage is that you iterate very fast thanks to the instant feedback and constant refinements. Here, you also will be happy to see the first benefits of going both through the user interviews in the research phase.

Detailed design

In this phase, we worked more separately. It was not necessary to sit in the same room because it did not require intense cooperation anymore. There are separate tasks, and both need to sync just once a day or at the end of the week to decide what’s next.

💪 Our challenge — we could not follow the 📚 textbook case in this phase since we did not take Andrej’s vacation into account in our planning.

Andrej gives feedback on the visuals.

Could we postpone it? 🤔 Theoretically yes, however in the real world there are deadlines, and we needed to deliver. So I took over this phase, and I needed to finish certain parts without Andrej. My point here is that based on our experience, it is completely fine to be flexible, affording to modify the method to your needs if necessary.

So what does the textbook case look like anyway? 🤓

  • The Gen pushes pixels, delivering high-fidelity assets for developers and for further feedback and discussions.
  • The Synth usually helps with documenting all design decisions and preparing the specifications for handover.
A slide from a Pair Design for creative teams talk by Karl Dotter.

Lessons learned

Yes, we learned something new, and we made some mistakes too.

👍

  • Super effective process — even if you‘re concerned about assigning two people, the pair hardly gets stuck when solving complex stuff.
  • High-speed iterations and staying on the right track — since the itinerary was released and heavily used, we’ve never heard any negative feedback.
  • Beneficial pairing Designer & Researcher — both roles bring different perspectives and skill-sets to the process. Andrej contributed in the research phases where I learned from him, and he learned from me in the design phases.
  • We gained a deep product domain knowledge — even when the project was over, our time investment paid off multiple times. Whenever I need to discuss something more complex, I can reach out Andrej for a chat, without first onboarding him to the topic.

👎

  • Planning failure — in the future, we’d definitely need to consider vacations in the planning. I needed to finish the detailed design phase without Andrej.
  • Loss of ownership — as Andrej could not join the last phase, he lost part of his ownership of the design. This later caused friction 😡 and debates on why I did some things differently than he intended.

Conclusion

Pair Design makes people happier, users included.

It was one of our best work experiences so far. It was successful, fun, we delivered, and it works. We shared both success 🎉 and also frustration 😤, which indeed made it easier to go through a difficult challenge.

At the end of the day, besides all the benefits this method gives, Pair Design makes for happy users because it guides you to deliver high-quality solutions in a tight deadline.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this and that our story inspires you enough to try Pair Design.

📚 Featured reading

Ebook

  • Pair Design — Gretchen Anderson, Christopher Noessel, O’Reilly Media, 2016

Talk (slides)

Articles

🥝🥝 You can follow the Kiwi.com UX Design Team on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, and Dribbble 🥝🥝

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Senior Product Designer @ Productboard. My thoughts, stories and ideas on UX and Product Design | tomaskupka.com