Let’s talk about the design process, productivity, speed and precision
How can you talk about design productivity? The process of design is highly iterative, selective and corrective. At times you explore the ‘design space’ for satisfactory approaches and then switch back to time-consuming in-depth analysis. You know upfront that half of the work is for the bin. Especially interaction design is through-and-through subjective and experiential: Design complexity emerges within activities of designing, experienced through acts of reflection, decision, and judgment. However, there are a few tactics that make these steps easier. Here are a few tips to help you set up the right environment to cope and structure this ‘creative chaos’.
It’s one of these days when you look at the outcome of your work and you think to yourself: Why the hell did it take me 8 hours to do that? In retrospect, the outcome looks like it may have taken 30 minutes of work.
Starting out
I designed my first website for the musician STING in early 1997. In the age of the Internet – this is light years away. I still remember fiddling around, together with my talented dear colleagues, adjusting and styling HTML tables to make the page templates look a bit more interesting, explorative and visually appealing. The result looked more like a rebellious internet art project inspired by Heath Bunting, Alexei Shulgin and Etoy, rather than a user-friendly website for a then famous musician. The tools we played with were Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 1.0, one of the first IDE’s made for the web. It was extremely unreliable. There weren’t many other tools around that time, so everything was manually assembled, designed, photoshopped, coded, tested and so on – pixel for pixel. Affordable Apple clones and originals weren’t as stable as they are today, so computer system crashes due to unverified extensions were quite common. We had days when — Booooom; and half a day of work was easily lost. A productive working session only took place when we were sitting together at the same table, clear about what we need to achieve that same day; ZIP drives connected and stable MACs dialled into our 56K modems. There was no Slack, hardly any email, just a Nokia and SMS. We were at an early stage of our design careers; synchronously connected networkers, internet beginners struggling to create websites of high quality in an effective and sustainable (repeatable) way.
Fast forward, 22 years later – not much has changed; I still see myself testing new tools, automating repetitive steps (or attempting to do so), crashing beta apps, introducing shortcuts where there haven’t been any before, experimenting with new ways of working, pushing design methodologies, changing team set-ups, refreshing my knowledge about the world-wide-web, underlying technologies and people’s usage behaviours. I feel the constant need of expanding this work-tool-learn continuum as much as possible to still get shit done because this is what it’s really all about when you get paid for doing (design) work: deliver maximum design quality in the shortest amount of time with the least effort using affordable, commonly used tools, processes and design methods.
It was never about being an internet tech-wizard or a master of one tool, one style, one design-technique or one type of design-process. Nor was it ever about being an early adopter of some fancy new magic trick or keyboard shortcut. It has always been about how well you connect with the client, people, tasks and goals at hand. How well you can anticipate upcoming challenges and what step you need to complete to be ready for the upcoming one. How well you know your weaknesses and the strenghts of your collegues.
I was lucky enough to have had the chance to step into amazing permanent roles as well as spend a lot of time freelancing for top agencies around the globe. This opened up opportunities to learn from diverse departments, teams and individuals. Get to know their ways of working, tools and design processes. Here are a few things I picked up and learned along the way.
Teams & Teaming-Up
One word; 50/50-split-task-sharing. The first job I had as a trained product designer fresh out of the art academy was actually working for my own agency, which I launched in 2001 together with a friend, who I poached from Pixelpark — one of the first successful digital-only agencies in Germany. Every project we pulled on land got split up fifty-fifty workload wise, so shares $$$ were clearly defined. That split also forced us to learn everything about the client, project, tasks and goals at hand equally well. This, in return, had the benefit that we were both always well informed and knew exactly what each of us can do, should do, needs help with or when we have to say ‘NO’ to doing something that was out of our comfort zone.
I took that approach with me when I later worked in other places, as it pretty much can always be applied no matter what role or level you are at; team up with someone else, acquire the same amount of insights for just everything there is to know about your project then split up the tasks and get down to work. You’ll see how much more ground you can cover that way in one day, a week or months. You not only are going to become more efficient, knowledgable and productive – it’s also less stressful and more inspiring and fun. Partnering up works extremely well when you have to mentor junior designers or UX researchers since you work very closely on similar tasks solving similar problems, sharing the wisdom and experience as you walk along. Cross-pollination, exchange and inspiration take place pretty much on a regular basis. This way of working scales easily and can be applied to larger teams working in different areas of the business. Trust me, from a management perspective it's way easier to get two people to work well together than 10.
Processes
I’ve worked at places where the design team had as many as 600 designers, spread across multiple locations working on numerous complex software products, single feature sets or just fixing bugs on a daily basis. It worked because the company had a well established (digital) business model, a well-tested process and highly qualified project and product managers, amongst other things, that kept the tanker running straight. I’ve also been in places — mostly startups — where a team of 5 designers were struggling to cover the ground needed to evolve not only the product but also the business and their clients/users at scale and speed. What made this team struggle? The answer is simple; task predictability.
Through my own observations, I noticed that people seem to be more productive when they know in advance what to do next and whose responsibility it is; they can focus on one thing at the time. This predictability also makes them more calm, better prepared and in some instances more motivated. A clear process can help increase productivity and design quality. As an example – let your team know whether you want them to be a bit more casual and informative with user research or follow a more strict, academic and also more time-consuming approach. You don’t have to micromanage and define a rulebook of behavioural patterns. What you want to do is lay out the playground so you can handover the trust and your team will do the rest.
This is especially true for more remote work settings: you cannot oversee what people do, but you still want to feel comfortable and help them, when necessary, in reaching their goals or just the next project phase in the most efficient manner. Outlining context, intent, methodologies, agreeing to milestones and setting up rough timelines for certain tasks helps members to better guide themselves. Perhaps, summon these with a tool like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).
Office space
Lots of research on this topic has been conducted over the past few years and this article provides just some of the latest insights on workspace design. In summary; a wrongly set up office can introduce too many distractions and truly drown peoples’ ability to focus and, therefore, lower the overall productivity. On the other hand, a well-designed office space can foster relationships, increase collaboration, conversations and the exchange of ideas. I heard many former colleagues say things like “I’ll like to come in early because it's quiet and I actually get work done.” On the other hand, they seem to enjoy inspiring conversations with valued colleagues and the ability to bounce off ideas and get feedback from each other, which in return improves the quality of their work. I feel the same way, but I know that, on many days, you just need to get a lot of stuff done. On such days I may not even want to be on slack, so I often turn off notifications completely and book out a time period on my calendar (Away — working).
I contracted once for a German design agency that had a really great setup; for every project, teams were assembled and then assigned to a single room. We kept this room until the project was finished, even if it was for several months. The room was large enough to designate multiple areas to diverse tasks. It was great because the different project teams/rooms did not interfere with each other, but where still within reach.
At Webcredible and Appnovation we took this approach with us and set up a ‘war room’ onsite at our clients' central offices. This physical space acted as a productive work hub but also as an always present meeting spot to get clients interested in what we were doing and to contribute their insights. At the same time, in this sort of setup, it is relatively important to schedule the times you engage with your clients, otherwise, you will face unforeseen and uncontrollable distractions, which, again, encroach on your time to execute.
Clients
I used to think that clients are just ‘in your way’ and holding you up from doing what you really want to do: push your design outcome to new heights. So at the start of a new project, it was always exciting to have received the initial requirements and perhaps have had a chance to do some discovery with selected stakeholders because this outlined the challenge –and– made the design task unique. But then, I was always happy when clients did not bother us anymore… My perception has changed.
Nowadays, I’ll include clients, customers and users from day one and ‘calculate’ with their active contributions throughout the project and product development. I don’t expect them to tell me what to do, because, after all, they are not designers. What I want, however, is a constant flow of new insights and continuous design validation. I use the technique of concierge and put work in front of as many people as possible within the shortest amount of time, rather than wait for a phase where you show the whole thing to a selected group of 5 to 6 test participants. The reason why I work this way is simple: the end-solution is often too large and complex and people are overwhelmed by the user test setup, task complexities and length of the sessions. After hearing your introductory questions and the first tasks, participants in user testing tend to have already developed a bias towards your product which, in turn, heavily influences their performance of the upcoming tasks. So it is often better to break up long user testing sessions into smaller ones. This is where more frequent client engagement comes in handy.
Help your clients understand that, from day one, the process will be all about designing and running frequent experiments until you reach a satisfactory goal (or your design budget).
I hope this article inspired you to introduce small changes to your daily workflow, the team set up, and an office environment. What do you do to be more productive and at the same time increase the quality of your design outcomes? Please share your strategies in the comment section.
You can hire me for your next research session or design project. I am currently based in Ottawa, Canada.
