Pillar 3: Elevate design execution
Raise the bar for overall quality of what reaches users. Establish and meet a higher standard of excellence.
In companies with less mature design teams, focus is on expediency and less so on quality. Or more accurately, quality design is not defined. Get the work done quickly, hope it looks good, share visceral reactions but little in the way of constructive critique. As a result there is no way to truly execute consistently good design.
To elevate design execution, you must first define what “good” is. This is a step that is often missed in establishing an effective design team. Everyone has their own sense of what good design looks like (including non-designers). But this isn’t openly discussed and documented. When building a new team, this is something we spend some focus on: What is good?
This usually starts with an honest evaluation of the current state of things. Often one of the first things my team will do is complete a heuristic evaluation of the site or app (or both). It’s important to look at things holistically, screen to screen, review from beginning to end the complete user flow. Capture every inconsistency, every friction point, every potential area where the pushed live components don’t live up to the level of experience we want for our users.
The reality is that teams rarely look at the whole journey. They work on pieces of it with tight deadlines. Taking the holistic view is a chance for everyone to get a true understanding of what the experience is like. It also strips away the “we had to just launch it and move on…” excuse that often results in less than ideal experiences going live. Users don’t care what your constraints are.
And with heuristic evaluations completed, you will likely have a list of things to fix. And this is important because it signals to the rest of the product org a seriousness about craft. And it will also point to business impact (“fix this issue on checkout to improve conversion by X%”).
Design principles are an important part of defining good design. They help inform how one might design something, as there are often many different ways to solve a problem. Perhaps more important than having an agreed upon principles, is the act of creating them. This is an exercise that should involve all of the design team. The debates, discussions that will take place will challenge everyone and help crystallize for everyone what is important and should be the essence of the product’s experience.
Our team’s design principles
At Drizly we established a set of design principles. These informed how we would design solutions. For those who don’t know, Drizly was an alcohol purchase and delivery app that paired customers with local liquor stores. Orders had a minimum order amount. Design principle #5: “It should be enjoyable” helped inform the best way to address this. Initially we treated orders that were under the minimum as an error state. You order size is has not reached the minimum. We would redesign it to treat it in a positive light. We redesigned it as a progress bar, urging the user on and celebrating when the minimum was achieved. Both approaches are valid. But one is more inline with our design principles.
Over time, a shared definition of “good design” develops amongst the design team. It is important for this to happen organically. I certainly coach up the team and share what I see is good and what is lacking. But it’s important for the notion of “good design” is internalized.
This leads me to an important point: in the early stages of a design team, it’s more important to focus on process — how we make good design decisions — rather than any single design decision. If we build the foundation of a good design process, owned and championed by each designer, then we will more consistently make good design decisions.
To effectively elevate design execution, it’s critical that an agreed upon understanding of good design is developed by the whole team. If all design decisions have to run through the head of design — me for instance — then that leader becomes a choke point. You overly rely on the individual to make decisions and shut down growth and development for the design team. And it’s not scalable. And so in building design teams, I endeavor to coach the team on how to make good design decisions. This leads to more stable and consistent design execution.