3 most common problems designers face in product startups

Illustration: Cogoport

It’s a fine Thursday evening, me and my mentor Gaurav are sitting in the garden area, basking in glory for we had just solved a crucial design problem, when a Product Manager approaches us. He looks concerned. “Gaurav, there are a lot of inconsistencies in design”, he says. Both of us exchange a look of “we saw it coming” and assure him that it’ll be taken care of. We go to our co-designer and tell him about the issue. No fault of his own, he says, “I don’t know. I joined the project when half of the work was already done.” Now imagine this happening every second day of your work cycle. Frustrating isn’t it?

I’ve been working with Cogoport for the past few months. I’ve had the experience of working with two product companies and one design studio. I used to face similar issues in my previous product company, Aasaanjobs. I realised that the processes in a design studio are much more sorted.

Coming back, imagine your company is based in multiple locations across the country and you have designers working remotely. How are we gonna solve the problem before it escalates beyond our reach? First thing that comes to your mind is a Design System. But having a so called “component library” for a Design System is not enough. We had a chance to build something. But before that, we needed to identify the problems.

1. Inconsistencies in Design

Such minor inconsistencies and errors usually skip through a layman’s eye. But they badly affect your interface.

Design team is always expected to work at high velocities. And when you’re designing a B2C product and trying to make that a marketplace for all stakeholders, inconsistencies are bound to happen. As the team expands and new designers join in, they are inherently excited to create something new. Also happens with old designers working remotely. It’s important to align everyone to the current system so that it doesn’t end up affecting the timeline and quality.

Component library can be one solution but only till a certain point. There needs to be proper documentation of the Design System, which brings us to the next problem(and a solution in itself).

2. Lack of proper documentation

Example: There are around 50 components set in the library for buttons. But a third person would never know when and how to use them.

Since we’re always working towards product release, dedicating proper time to the Design System Management becomes impossible. Unless we become Uber and hire multidisciplinary teams solely working on it. That’s the dream right?

We need to manage this along with our daily tasks. So planning the document becomes very important. I’ll discuss how to create a DSM doc in another article. First let’s discuss what all it should have. It should:

1. Be a single source of truth for all the team members so that they don’t have to leave their workspace every time they want to look for references(trust me, it can be very irritating).
2. Have the Dos and Don’ts of the exhaustive components, supported with good examples of usage.
3. Have latest collaboration plugins with Sketch, Figma or whatever software you use.
4. Be updated constantly and communicated to everyone, which is another problem in itself.

3. Communication challenges

Illustrations | Coloured: Cogoport. B/W: Growwwkit

“Diversity is the art of thinking independently, together.” — Malcolm Forbes

Remember that frustrated designer who always complained about constant library updates and which component to use where? And that other guy who never knew what the designer in Bangalore was working on? Well, their misery was genuine. We can’t neglect the fact that each person has their own way of thinking and a set of rules can’t just be forced on them. The person who is in-charge of the DSM and setting up design processes, should be sensitive enough to understand this fact. Empathy helps in bringing the team together and making DSM a success. It’s our responsibility to communicate all the updates from time to time to all the team members, which also includes taking their feedback on a particular component or someone else’s feature. Here are some good practices that teams can follow:

1. Weekly Design Stand-Ups and retrospection sessions. So that all team members are aligned to the common vision.
2. Training people to use the design system. Otherwise, you’ll find designers detaching the symbols away to glory.
3. Common design repository. Organising and file naming conventions can be setup and the files can be stored in cloud for everyone to access anytime they want.
4. Weekly or monthly internal design assignments and DSM review. Small 15 minute assignments can be given to all the members to see whether or not everyone is updated with the DSM.
5. Design Quality Check(commonly known as QC). Designers with OCD, this becomes your favourite task!

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” — Henry Ford

It’s easy to blame the organisation when things don’t fall in place or when the processes aren’t set the way we want them to be. We often forget that in startups, everyone is working towards building something, together. Design teams should work parallelly on their own structure along with meeting product deadlines. It’s OK if you don’t have a great portfolio, but if you have the right skillset and you can align to the team’s vision to build something together, even from scratch, you’ve come to the right place!

Thanks for reading!