EmpowerUX
7 ways to create a co-creation design culture for growing startups
Shrink the knowledge gap between designers and company-wide team members to create better designs and new community-defined innovations.
Growing pains
Five years ago, I joined a startup for the first time after a new funding round, which made for a whirlwind of a social and professional experience. Since then, I’ve joined and consulted for several emerging and growing startups following Series A through C funding rounds. I’ve become used to seeing new faces appear left and right, but I’ve found that this can make it hard to get a handle on who does what at the company. Who is taking care of customer success? Who has the most accurate understanding of user-workflows? Who has the relationships with clients and can set up meetings? Everyone you wouldn’t expect, it seems.This isn’t an uncommon problem at startups, but for designers, it’s fundamentally problematic to our design process. When it’s not clear where to go, information is bottlenecked.
Designers know that to do better work, they need to be closer to their users and better connected to the company stakeholders that interact with them. The question is, how can they do this at scale while taking into account ever-changing companies?
For me, it has always been clear that one of the best ways to do this is by establishing a thriving design culture, that is, a company-wide culture that involves design and collaboration in the decision-making process of every team. Establishing a design culture is a job in-and-of-itself, because it means providing widespread education and design leadership around the company. However, at startups, design teams are typically very small and have a lot of feature-specific design work to do. What always seems more important than getting everyone on board with one culture is getting everyone talking to each other. I’ve found that the best way to do this is by placing a greater emphasis on a useful technique called “co-creation designing”.
Co-creation design culture
Co-creation design is an approach where product teams actively involve all stakeholders and create a large pool of information to make the right product and design decision throughout the design process, which in turn ensures the result strongly fits stakeholder needs. This overlaps with community-based design, as Don Norman explains in this article.
I typically have three main strategies to get people to share information and create a more collaboration-centered design culture.
- Create an open dialogue with teams across the company
- Spread the word about the design and the design team
- Include people in the design process
If this strategy sounds a bit like creating a design culture, that’s partly the point. The difference being that the goal is to get people providing large quantities of information, and collaborating within the design culture as a result.
Here are the things I’ve previously done to foster co-creation in my design process.
1. Introducing the design team to the company
Participation starts with saying “Hello! We’re here, and we’d love to chat.”
Design advocacy and spreading the word about the design team can often be the best way to start new conversations. However, beyond just knowing what design does, co-creation requires that people actually know who does the design work.
For instance, upon meeting design team members, co-workers begin engaging right away, explaining how happy they are to have someone to express all their ideas to. Without a face to the design team, this is impossible.
For each company, I start thinking about how I can make sure people feel more comfortable reaching out. In the past, I’ve created a presentation about the design team and have spoken at different teams’ weekly meetings about the design team and process, the results we provide, as well as providing a means of communication with us. This allows people to put faces to the design team, ask questions, and see opportunities to participate in our process. After each presentation, different people reach out and propose ways to positively impact the company’s product quality or workflow.
Tech team-members speak to me about adding steps to the design process and strategies to avoid communication problems for the future. Data scientists and product-configurators, the people setting up the product for users, come to speak to me about maintaining quality through UX-centered feature guidelines. Helpful ideas spring up, like UX-wikis for features and strategies to ensure quality control. The longer I work at a company, the more people start reaching out or tagging me in conversations about design flaws or new ideas.
The first step to encouraging co-creation is reaching out! Creating a dialogue with other teams at the company opens up a slew of opportunities that improve the quality of collective workflows, as well as the entire product.
2. Sharing knowledge
To maximize knowledge sharing, everyone needs to be aligned on use-cases and feel confident about what they have to say.
Getting people to participate won’t always be as easy as creating the means. When trying to encourage people to voice their opinions about design questions, it’s important to realize that not everyone is comfortable participating. Lack of participation feels frustrating at first, but I’ve learned that it largely stems from a lack of context. Team members that don’t know the details of use-cases and the needs of clients can feel unsure about the relevance of their opinions and thus be reluctant to share. The best way to enable people to participate is to make sure they have the tools and knowledge they need to feel confident.
Demos are a great way to remedy this problem because they can showcase interesting use-cases, current and future design projects, and any learnings acquired by the design and product team. In fact, demos can work both ways with other team members, like developers, showing their own work and learnings. I’ve experienced developers teaching the product team about frameworks, design system structures, and complex implementation issues that they solved. A pool of knowledge creates a shared understanding of product vision and goals, and increases confidence for all.
Another useful way to establish face-to-face time with curious team members is designer tea time. This gives the team space to learn more about the design process, ask questions about product decisions and learn details about design problems they may otherwise not have learned!
Once the team members feel they understand the use-cases, they’ll be able to add thinking power and come up with solutions to make the product better. At previous companies, I’ve seen developers kickstart their own design projects, even spending free time working on features like dark-mode.
This type of initiative comes from people who are engaged in the goal of great design and UX and have the knowledge to make that goal a reality.
3. Establishing direct channels of communication
Creating easy opportunities for outreach, brainstorming, and discussion is a great way to foster innovation.
People don’t always know they can give product feedback to the design team directly. Sometimes I’m included and exposed to feedback that impacts the product and design, and sometimes I’m not. A great way to ensure the design team receives feedback from other teams is by creating design forums, email threads, or dedicated chat rooms.
A useful strategy I’ve picked up after discussing this issue with other designers is to create a UX collaboration chat room where people can post about quick-wins, visual bugs, or ideas for improvements. Co-workers across the board are exposed to your product, it makes sense to give them an easy means to provide feedback.
This is also a great way to make sure people feel heard and reduces frustration amongst co-workers who feel progress isn’t being made. With a dedicated chatroom, I hear all feedback, mitigate the discussion, and prioritize what is important.
4. Organizing usability tests internally
Having co-workers test new features internally is a simple way to provide visibility into new features and leverage the knowledge of people who are well-attuned to the needs of users.
People love getting a first look at new features and will often give valuable insights that stem from day to day work with users. When testing, ask participants to speak out loud and prompt them to give their general impression of the interface, in addition to completing specific tasks. This will enable you to receive feedback on both the intuitiveness of your design, as well as all their general thoughts and insights. As a bonus, allowing team members to participate in the design of the product creates a happy culture and makes people more interested in working at the company.
It usually takes a few tries to create a test that is specific enough to focus the feedback, but broad enough that users feel comfortable brainstorming. For user testing I’ve researched many tools and have landed on Lookback so far, a user testing tool that allows designers to create moderated and unmoderated tests with defined tasks, all recorded and ready to review. This is a great tool because users can go through features at their own pace and remotely. However, there are great alternatives to Lookback and the tool you choose depends on the needs of your future testers.
Typically, I’ll prepare an explanation detailing what the design team would like to gain from a specific user test, with the goal of making participants feel comfortable speaking their minds. I recommend spending the majority of the test evaluating a tester’s ability to complete specific tasks and leave room at the end to ask about their thoughts on the general experience. Sometimes, users will stay very focused on the tasks, and other times they’ll go off on a tangent and create connections that you would have never otherwise have thought about. Make sure you carefully plan how you:
- Ask questions
- Avoid confirmation bias
- Make people feel comfortable
- Create time for open feedback and general thoughts
It also helps to remind users that mistakes and criticism are welcome, otherwise they may feel reluctant to give you negative feedback.
5. Client product validation sessions
Include your clients in discussions around product concepts early, they love being a part of the brainstorm!
When you create relationships with a few key users/clients, they’ll feel more personally involved with the feature or product you’re creating and happily give additional ideas you might have never considered. The more excited you are about their feedback, the more excited they’ll become about giving it to you. I have even had clients offer to be available more liberally, ad hoc-style, as advisors throughout the design process because they were so happy to see their feedback being integrated.
One thing to note is that balancing all client feedback in this way can be tricky, but ultimately many clients will have overlapping needs. This is a great way to show them you understand their problems and are interested in collaborating to find a solution.
6. Keeping everyone updated about progress
Keep stakeholders updated about progress, they’ll feel included and appreciated.
When people become invested in your design process and contribute their ideas, they want to stay updated about the progress. So if someone recommends an improvement, or reaches out to you about something they think you’ll find useful, follow up and explain what you did with that information, as well as what improvements are coming! This will make people feel considered and satisfied.
A great way to do this product-wide is to use release notes: release notes demonstrate what the product team is doing as a whole and showcase real improvements being made each month. Release notes shared internally are like a release newsletter that features visuals and information about the product.
I recommend creating a release note structure that is an enjoyable experience to read, with lots of visuals and big readable text. Some companies even choose to take it to the next level, an original take on release notes is from Medium, which shares release notes through storytelling, dialogue, and poetry.
I’ve tested different release note styles and found that simple lists sent over email generate very little engagement compared to Google Slides segmented into intro, new features, improvements, and outro sections. You immediately see a difference in engagement, primarily through responses and comments!
Sending out a list of notes used to feel like sending an email out to the void, but with slides, you can see who’s looking at the notes, how many people there are, and you’ll have a lot more questions and responses to answer! Regularly updating stakeholders about progress helps people get excited and feel included the whole way through.
For a link to these slides, click here.
7. Saying thank you
Let people know you value and appreciate their help.
Finally, being consistent about positive reinforcement for everyone participating in your design process is just as important as any of the points above. People aren’t always sure if what they’ve said was valuable or made any sense at all.
It’s highly important to encourage participants through positive affirmations. When people feel useful and appreciated, they’ll be confident about participating more and more. This will create a recurring pool of participants who are comfortable in the feedback flow of a design process and are willing to contribute as part of an ecosystem. That way, there’s less onboarding or management for the designer to do, and more feedback to mull over!
Unlock everyone’s product passion
The idea of co-creation design is to create a passion for the product in everyone. The more involved people feel, the happier they’ll be when they see an exciting new feature or product that they helped bring to life.
Let’s recap the ways a participatory design can be implemented in a startup:
- Introduce yourself to the company
- Share knowledge
- Establish easy channels of communication
- Organize usability tests internally
- Host client product validation sessions
- Keep everyone updated
- Say thank you!
If you’re interested, check out these two articles that focus on leveraging participation with company and client stakeholders:
- IDEO’s take on succeeding better at innovation challenges and how a more human approach to engagement and participation in companies helps.
- A UX Magazine article on participatory design activities that help to better understand stakeholders.
Remember that transparency and collaboration are the landmarks of effective design. Creating positive relationships with key stakeholders will make the difference between feeling stuck and feeling inspired in your design work.
Finally, get feedback about you, too. You want to make sure people find engaging with the design team easy, so make sure you’ve iterated and improved on that experience. You’ll create better pathways for feedback and strengthen the relationships you’ve built as a result.
What do you think about co-creation design?
Thanks for reading this post until the end, I’m happy to find other designers motivated to uplift their knowledge. I’d love to hear about your experiences with company-wide collaboration and how you maximize the information that finds you as a designer! Feel free to leave any questions you have and reach out if you’d like to chat more.
