Things I learned in My First 6 Months as a Product Designer

I’ve been breathing design since the beginning of my career (Apart of my engineering jobs) but for the past six months, I’ve been involved deeply into design role. This is my first full-time professional job as Product Designer and I’ve learned so much. It feels great when you can finally apply all knowledge that you’ve been known but never had a chance to really doing them. This is the real walk the talk and I want to share what exactly the fundamental/facts I’ve been facing in order to actualise this role.

Building Empathy

I’ve seen many times, people who are not a designer raised and solved interesting UX problems that even we are as designer could not. These people have the emotion to conceptualised potential user-centric problem of your design. They have Empathy.

Designer should be the one that have higher empathy than anyone else in the room. No matter new or experienced you are to this field, your end product can be easily judged by how much efforts you put into your work to make user’s life easier. Every time I struggle using a product, I would think “This designer didn’t care me enough”. It’s like preparing stuff for your next special guest, you gotta think one step ahead to make sure you already prepared and have all things for their future needs.

Before start designing, try to imagine how user will use your product, what bad things that you don’t want them to experience, how to make them satisfied and what are they expectations. Think about the variety type of edge cases, interruptions and goals. The less empathy and care you put towards them, the less you have become to be a better designer.

Understand the Business

Designing product is a mixed between maximising profit and delightful user experience. Product that can balance these two aspects is the winner.

Facebook could not live without ads, so it’s a lie if their highly reputable design team didn’t think where to fit ads every time they are designing a feature.

If you are designing an e-commerce site, the main design goal would be to create systematic interfaces to help users find what they needs and to influence them to buy products with less hassle as possible. Yes, you can always add beautiful images with different kind of layouts to make it slick, but in the end, without a considered design decision to push the conversion, your design have no purpose and practically useless.

Of course, there are always be trade offs, that is why you need to take some time to learn the business implications behind every feature, then you can understand which part should be sacrificed and which one should be precedented.

Manage to Focus

If you don’t have the resource to do many things well in one time, narrow it down. I use this technique to oversee features as a whole set of development plan to learn which part should I focus on and also its dependency. From this point of view, you can clearly see that each feature is not equal. While you think one feature is simple enough to build, turns out it has many dependencies to other part of the product. One time you think it’s important to build this feature, turns out it’s not highly valued by user.

You must decide to build the right thing first then build it right. The purpose is not to ship ANY features, it’s to ship the right one with amazing user experience.

Intense focus on design can be blinding

Directly open Sketch or Photoshop then play with colors, shapes and typography before knowing the product definition is dangerous.

Design considerations to make those visual decisions are coming from outside. You should go out and bright facts in. You must understand the end-to-end of product you are building since It’s not always about micro-interactions but also macro-interactions.

Every design decisions should come from the force that make it should be. Every objects in this world exist because there is a force that make them happens. If you understand it before you start digging into aesthetic, you’ll be well informed of the actual context and scope, therefore these will help you to decide not just better but a thoughtful design decisions. Start the design process from outside-in not otherwise.

To be continued.. (Part 2)