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Framework

Are your design policies a “House rule” or “The Law”?

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If we want to continue to improve the UX maturity of our organization, we first need to be brutally honest about where we are on the totem pool, so we can plan strategically on how to increase our influence.

The problem is, we designers are often delusional. We confuse how we think the world works versus how the world actually works.

That’s why I always cringe a little bit when I hear designers use the word “should” when it comes to dealing with stakeholders.

They should follow the design spec! or…

They should come to us with a problem not the solution!

Nonsense, nobody should do anything unless it is The Law.

The word “should” implies a policy has already been established. It implies our idea of “how we want to do things” has been explicitly communicated, agreed upon, and documented with consensus from the other party, and now you are simply enforcing the policy as agreed.

When none of these has happened, your policy is not a widely accepted law, and you can’t expect other teams to follow it.

The design team’s influence reality check exercise

Here is an exercise you can do with your team for a reality check on how much influence the design team actually has in your company. 

Look at your design policies and ask this simple question: 

“Is this a House rule or the Law?”

House rules — are policies that only work within your social group, but have no effect on the outside world. In other words, only the design team cares, everybody else ignores this rule.

You can decide to play Monopoly however you want in your house amongst your friends, but if you play with strangers, they won’t follow your House rules.

If the designers agreed that “Pixel perfect is important” and every designer pays attention to it when they design, that is great! But if no one outside the design team cares, and if they don’t have to do what you say, it is a House rule, not The law.

The Law— Everybody has to obey this policy. In the real world, people have to obey the law or there will be consequences — like going to jail (well…at least in theory). For example, in my previous role at a bank, teams must meet a set of predefined accessibility requirements or the project won’t be allowed to go live (that means nobody gets their bonus).

In reality, your design policies probably fall somewhere between these extremes. To visualize this, draw a line, and write “House rules” on the left and “The Law” on the right. List your important design policies and place them on a slider to determine their position between the two extremes. It should look something like this:

This is more art than science, the point is to do it with your team so you know which area is solid and which area needs work.

Now you have a visual representation of whether a policy is closer to a house rule where nobody cares, or closer to the law where everybody respects. 

The idea is that the more design policies you have that are on the right side of the spectrum, the higher the influence the design team has in the organization.

If you are an aspirational design leader, one of your high-leverage activities is to look at how many design policies you wish to turn from “House rules” into “The Law”, prioritize them, then lobby them one at a time.

Hope this exercise brings clarity to your design organization and good luck!

How to choose which battle to fight as a designer

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As designers, we have been told we should “learn to choose which battle to fight” because we can’t win every argument. However, no one has taught us how to choose which battle to fight.

When I first became a design lead managing a group of designers, I found myself in meetings all day with designers trying to figure out how we should react in different situations. 

Team A did not follow the design system, team B insisted to push for a design that hurts the UX and team C decided that accessibility does not matter. Every scenario seems unique and we have to come up with a response every time. 

Without a framework, we felt like we are constantly fighting fires. We became reactive. We wasted mental energy figuring out how we should react. It was unsustainable.

Eventually, I found a way. In this article, I will share a framework that helped me solve this problem and gain back my sanity — I call it the “Rules of Engagement” framework, it helps you clarify:

  • When you should fight a battle
  • How much effort to spend on each battle
  • How to fight effectively

Let’s get right into it.

Rules of engagement 

In military speak, “Rules of Engagement” refers to official orders that describe when and how a soldier should engage enemies in a combat situation.

The idea is to proactively think ahead of how you would react when different situations occur, instead of passively waiting for it to happen and then figuring out what to do. This way, you avoid knee-jerk reactions and can focus your limited mental capability on truly unique matters.

When to engage & effort to spend

Imagine your design team as a country under siege by design-related issues. You have limited resources, so you have to prioritize which cities to defend using a tiering system. For example:

  • Tier 1 city would be your capital. Spend all blood and sweat defending it at all costs. This is the hill to die for, DO NOT retreat!
  • Tier 2 cities are important. Put up a strong fight and only retreat when the casualty is too high.
  • Tier 3 cities are the outer-rim territories, you don’t want others to take over them too easily. Put up a decent fight then retreat when the attack is too strong to conserve energy.

Applying to design, this would mean figuring out “How do we categorize our issues and How should we respond”?

Your tier list might look something like this:

The beauty of this framework is twofold:

  1. It forces your team to align on which area is important versus which is not. You conceptualize what matters. There is no individual guesswork, nor a designer going rogue debating stakeholders on things that just don’t matter.
  2. It is liberating to not have to think each time. Since you have done the hard work upfront to decide how you would react ahead of time, you know what to do 90% of the case. You avoid getting sucked into endless debates that don’t add value to your work. You conserve your energy to focus on the 10% outliers.

How to implement this framework 

  1. Get a whiteboard and draw 3 rings with a bullseye in the middle, label them Tier 1 to 3 starting from the center. 
  2. Write down common issues you face on sticky notes, then put them on the rings according to their importance level. Obviously, developers missing the checkbox by 2 pixel does not count as a Tier 1 issue. Well, at least in my team.
  3. Decide the appropriate response per tier. e.g. Tier x means putting in y amount of effort to argue with stakeholders before you escalate.
  4. Do this exercise with other designers and document the rationale so you can reference it in the future.

You are going to have disagreements and debates on which area is important, but that’s okay! It is much better to have an internal fight now than wait until the issue occurs and scramble to find the right response. 

Multiple tier list

You might find it beneficial to have multiple tier lists depending on your situation. In my previous role, the company was organized around international markets. The strategic importance market — the one that makes the most revenue — gets the most attention from stakeholders, so it made sense for us to consider this in prioritizing our responses.

I had two tier lists, one for the market and another for the nature of the issue. 

When an issue arises, I will follow this procedure:

  • First, look at the market — Which market does this issue come from? Is it from a strategically important market? i.e. Hong Kong or Singapore?
  • Next, I will look at the nature of the issue — What does this issue fall on? Accessibility? Design alignment?

Then I simply respond according to the pre-defined action.

How to engage effectively

From cold call scripts to product FAQs, the most successful teams would actively seek out repeatable solutions and systemize them. From my experience, the most effective way to help the design team engage with stakeholders is to provide them with the following:

  • Sample response scripts— These are successful scripts used in the past collected from wise designers that one can plug and use according to different scenarios. For example, a sample script on “ how to deal with stakeholders that don’t want to follow design pattern”. Constantly ask your designers to provide feedback on the scripts so you can continuously improve them.
  • Design policy & rationale — Decisions the design team made that designers can refer to. For example, to handle the situation where stakeholders don’t want to follow the new design pattern, you can say “Our policy is to apply a NEW design pattern on every new design”. Then if stakeholders continue to push, the designer can give out the rationale.

Don’t have a policy yet? Just start making one up now. I am serious. “Policy” is just a fancy name for how your team makes decisions based on grounded rationale. Once you have referred to your rationales enough times, it will become a de facto policy. You just have to start writing it down now so others can refer to it later.

I have included an example of what your rules of engagement document might look like. You can visit this Notion page and create a template for yourself.

Now whenever an issue arises, you can look at the table to identify how important it is, how much effort to put into it, and know exactly what to say.

Benefits of this framework

To recap, the “Rules of engagement” framework benefits the design team in the following ways:

  • Provides clarity — You know exactly when you should fight, how much effort to spend, and how to fight effectively. No more guesswork.
  • Empowerment — Your team feels empowered as they know how to handle different situations on their own. You can delegate decision-making to your team and free yourself from becoming the bottleneck.
  • Consistent response — Everyone on your team can act on your behalf and provide a high-quality response. You remove the scenario where Designers A and B will give different answers under the same situation.
  • Saves time — You can avoid unnecessary meetings since your team doesn’t have to come to you every time for answers.

I hope you give this framework a try. If you do please let me know how it turns out for you! 

10 Lessons I learned working in a global bank as a designer

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To wrap up 2022, I am sharing 10 lessons I learned working 4 years as a Product Design Lead in my previous role at HSBC.

Working in a big corporation like this is complicated, I have to deal with a lot of stakeholders, understand the rules, the un-spoken rules and at the same time trying to help the design team gain more influence.

These are the lessons I wished someone could have taught me when I first started. Hopefully you found these useful and avoid the same mistakes I made!

Warning: It is a long read, but I promised you will find value in it!

1. There is a glass ceiling that’s ok!

Let’s face it, it is unlikely a designer will ever become a CEO in a traditional bank. Having a “Head/VP of Design” or “Chief Design officer” is as good as it gets. It doesn’t matter whether management truly support design team or not, there is a glass ceiling. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Nature of business
  2. You are not actually building the product

Nature of business

Instagram cannot exist without their product because the product is the business. A traditional bank doesn’t sell digital products, their apps is just a way to make your day to day transactions easier, it makes money through mortgages, credit cards, loans and all other kind of financial products.

Just because a traditional company “went digital” doesn’t magically turn them into a digital business. In simple words:

  • The bank is not too screwed if nobody uses their app.
  • Instagram is totally screwed if nobody uses their app.

Bluntly put, the app just needs to be good enough for a traditional bank. If the rates and fees are good, customers has a very high tolerance level to their digital products. Hell, they don’t even want to stay on a banking app for that long, who really wants to use a banking app anyway? Have you heard anyone addicted to their banking app? Me neither.

You are not actually building the product

When you design and UI for the bank for whatever product they are selling, you are not building the product, you are building the digital representation of the product they are selling. Their “product” is whatever mortgages, credit cards, loans or wealth portfolio they come up with. You see, their product already exist in a form of digital document that is 30 pages long, and what you build is a sign-up form or dashboard for these products.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the UX is really nice? Of course! But in the end of the day, the specific details on product such as “rates” or “returns” are what matters, not the design. 

To recap, the nature of business limits the impact you are going to make since you are not actually building the product. And that’s ok! Design team doesn’t need to make it to the top for every company out there. It is important to understand strategically what you can gain from each company you work for. The ceiling doesn’t matter as long as there is still room for you to grow and someone to learn from. 

For me, my goal was to become a better strategic thinker and a better presenter. I had a great manager, and worked with other Service Design Leader and Design System Leaders that I learn a great deal from and that’s why I stayed for a long time even though I understood eventually I will hit a glass ceiling. Always have a plan on what you want to gain for each role and move on when you have learned everything from there.

2. Learn to influence or you are doomed

It is extremely important for us as designers to understand the fundamental reason why influence is an important skill to master as a designer. Everyone said so, but why? For getting a raise or promotion? For a happier design team? For your mental health? I argue that it is a matter of survival for the design team. Here is why:

  1. A team needs resources to survive
  2. Every team wants to survive (aka have a job and don’t get fired)
  3. There is limited resources in a company

A team that doesn’t have resources does not survive by definition. Following the same logic, the maximum survival strategy is to have as much resources as possible, ideally ALL the resources of the company.

Realistically, you can’t control all the resources in a company, but the bigger the pie the better. To get resources, you need people that owns the money to give it to you. People usually do it by:

  • Convince decision maker to give them more (you should do this)
  • Undermine other teams so decision maker won’t give money to other teams (you shouldn’t do this)

Why can’t we just chill and not do anything? Why can’t you remain a small team and just do your own thing? Well, because the design team consume resources. Other team has the incentives to want to kick you out if they don’t think you are valuable so they can have a bigger piece of the pie (according to point #3 and the maximum survival strategy stated above)

Furthermore, there are 2 more uncontrollable factors that you can count on that are guaranteed to happen if you remain in the same role long enough. They are:

  1. Economy going south (already happened as per writing this article)
  2. Old management leaves and new management comes onboard

Whenever the above thing happens, the first thing the leadership team do is to see which team is non-essential. If you want to survive, part of your job is to constantly remind people with money why your team is essential. The art of convincing leaders and peers from other department is called Influence. The better you are at do it, the safer your team (and your self) is when things eventually go south.

3. Ask for forgiveness, not permission

It is a big company, if you ask for permission to do the right thing all the time, you can’t get shit done. The key is to do it anyway and think of a good way to say sorry if people complains. Make sure to inform your boss so they have your back before you do that thing.

For example, when I worked in the Staff digital team responsible for building tablet apps for staff to serve customers in the branch, I wanted the front-line staffs to test my design on their tablet. If I emailed the branch manager, I am 99.99% sure they will reject my request because it will “distract their work” and we didn’t have a relationship.

So I just went to the branch and have a “private” conversation with the staff there. Nobody knew I wasn’t a real customer and if the staff generally want me to go away they will just say so. Truth is, everyone in the branch is happy to be beta testers on new features and they didn’t report me to their boss because I made them feel important and I genuinely value their feedbacks.

A lot of times, what you think you cannot do is just a mental barrier. You can always do something, there are just consequences that may or may not occur. If you are in doubt, ask yourself “what is the worse that could happen?”, the reality is probably not as bad as you think. My general rule of thumb is do whatever you think helps your team as long as it won’t get you fired. Worked great for me so far.

4. Understand the REAL WHY

The difference between an order taker and a professional is the ability to take control of the situation. A professional knows what they are doing and won’t let other people boss them around. Have you seen a great doctor just let other people tell them how to do their job? No, they take control of the situation and ask questions.

Business said X, Legal said Y. Why? who exactly said that? Who the hell is “business” or “legal” anyways? Behind any enquiry, there is a real human behind it, why can’t we as designers apply empathy and understand their hopes, fears and dreams? What is their concern? What worries them? Is it a power move so that they feel they are in control of the situation?

In other cases, you want to show strength as well. Show people you won’t back down if the other side is not prepared for a fight. Anyone can throw out unsolicited opinion, very rarely do people work hard to form comprehensive statement based on facts. Have the courage to challenge what people say by requesting evidences to back it up! 

For example, if stakeholders insist to change a design that has worked in the past but they want to change it because they have a different OPINION, kindly remind them you do value their opinion (maybe not really, but you say that anyway because your parents taught you manner so you act nice), but this design has proven to work in the past, “what” are the evidence to support what they believe what they suggest will improve the UX? How confident are they?

If you change your design because other people demand it every time regardless of their seniority, you are a vendor, you are “just here to make things pretty”. You are an order taker. If you have a choice between being an order taker or being a professional, which would you choose? I know my answer.

5. Own your boundaries

You need to let other know your boundaries and stick to it, or someone else will set it for you. If you don’t want to join a lunch meeting, don’t join. If you don’t want to join a 7pm meeting, don’t join. (This doesn’t apply to teams that cross time-zone, in this case, do the fair thing where sometimes you have late meetings and other times the person in the UK does the same thing).

You have more power than you think. Sometimes we felt that we can’t say no to unrealistic demands, but what is the worse thing that can happen if you reject a stakeholders demand? Come and drag you to a meeting? Download Figma and draw it themselves?

Probably nothing.

The best they can do is complain to your boss, but if you have articulate your point clearly with evidence to backup your decisions and let your boss know up front, you have nothing to fear. 

Don’t let others dictate your workflow

Inevitably, someone will ALWAYS send an “urgent” email and demand a reply “ASAP”, as if whatever project they work on is always the most important project for the company. You will feel the impulse to pause everything you do and reply to that email.

Don’t do it. Two reasons:

  1. It probably isn’t urgent
  2. Rushing your reply will always make the situation worse 

It probably isn’t urgent

Think about it, what is really “urgent” in our role? Do we control the finance operation or the IT systems? Will the designers be able to do anything if someone hacks the system? Unless payroll made an accounting error where your CEO’s three-million bonus now shows up in your bank account and they want it back right now, nothing is urgent. 

Just because someone higher up wants an answer quickly so they don’t have to remember it and ask it again in the future doesn’t mean it’s urgent. It just means they will get annoyed if they can’t get an answer now. Just because someone came up with a deadline without consulting you doesn’t make it urgent either. It is their problem.

What happens most of the time is that nothing happens if you don’t reply to the email immediately, the other party will often send a follow up email a day or two later chasing you or send you a Slack message at 6pm the same day. As a rule of thumb, if the matter can wait until 6 pm or one to two days later, it is by definition not urgent. 

Have a list of priorities for your team and yourself. Everyday, create a checklist with no more than 3 items and work ONLY on those things. Mentally have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on when you check your communication channels and how long it takes for your to reply. I set a rule for myself where I batch read emails in a specific time in morning and in the afternoon and never read it in between, this way I am free from distractions and focus on real work.

If an email comes it that do require your immediate attention, weight against your checklist and think “If I do not complete the tasks on my checklist and reply to these emails, will it benefit myself or my team”? Only reply to those emails if it is the later case. In the end of the day, you are not judged on how fast you reply to emails, you are judged on how well you can perform on your job. You work on your priorities, not someone else’s.

Rushing your reply will always make the situation worse

OK, let say the email is truly urgent and a project can’t go live today if you don’t reply to it right now. What do you do? Write a reply immediately and send it? Wrong.

Everything you wrote in haste are almost always not thoughtful enough and everything you wrote ill be used against you. I never had a good experience when I reply quickly to an important email, either my facts is off or the tone is wrong and I end up writing multiple follow up emails or have to eventually jump to a Zoom call to explain things. 

Take your time to collect information around the subject and compose a response but DON’T SEND IT YET. Send it to someone senior or someone you can trust for a second opinion to ensure you have covered things from different perspectives when the email is truly urgent. 

6. Process and documentation are your best friends

If you find yourself explaining same things over and over again to some people, it is time for you to create a process. There are two key benefits of creating a process:

  1. Process allows you to do more work with less time, why? Because once you wrote down how something works once you can point people towards that instead of explain things 1000 times. We are in business of deep work, this means that it takes time for a designer to warm up to get into a state of flow. While it may take you 10 minutes to explain how some things work, it will take you at least 30 minutes to warm up again to get into the state of the flow. 
  2. Another benefit of a process is it also helps other to repeat the success you had so you are making the team become more productive. For example, create scripts for the team to answer common stakeholder questions regarding design rationale. This is one of the ways you can scale your team and make yourself become more valuable because you remove yourself as the bottle neck.

Same logic applies to things like creating documentation on decision made for the project. I can’t remember how many times my team asked me for a decision I made about a design and it was a pain to go through all the email and Slack messages. Now I just simply wrote down important product decisions and ask whoever to refer to that document.

7. Policies gives you credibility

Do you hate it when you ask the same questions from two different person under the same department and getting 2 different responses? It happens quite often in a big company, it feels unprofessional and I certainly don’t want other team to feel the same towards the design team.

Stakeholders will often challenge your or are just generally curious — “Why did the design team made that decision and what was it based on?”

If your team had exist for a while and you haven’t codify your thought process, you are not running it very efficiently. Having a clear policy document helps free you the headache of coming up with an explanation ad-hoc, make your decision more transparent, and avoid giving contradictory answers. Ultimately, having clear policies will help your team earn respect from others because someone (you) has taken the time to think about how your team make decisions.

A policy is a way to articulate our thinking process. Once you articulate it, your rationale became clear. People can debate around it and you can work on improving it. If you have a good policies in place, you can save your mental energy to react to the outliers, not repeatable problems, the HARD problems. Most importantly, it allows you to scale the team because everyone on your team understand your rationale so they can act on your behalf. You remove the scenario where Designer A and B will give different answers under the same situation.

Creating a policy is not that hard, you start with the most common questions stakeholders ask and document what your team replies. Then, extract the most convincing argument or rationale from those replies and you have your version 1.0 of your design team policy. Basically, if someone asks your team a hard question. Ask yourself is this question likely to come up again/ has it already been ask, if so, create a policy to handle similar situations in the future.

8. It’s a marathon, pick your fight strategically

A real leader focuses on the big picture and pick their fight carefully. Your bigger goal for the design organization should always be demonstrating the value of design and drive design maturity of the business. You don’t need to win every battle, you just need to win the war. Otherwise, you will make too many enemies along the way and you will be so sucked into debates that you can’t work on the important things.

Picking a fight is an art on its own. Is it important to CC everybody when the developer misses the UI by one pixel? (Pro tip: no) What is something that you should never back down? Where do you draw the line? One helpful exercise you can do is to list out the design policies from your team. Then, as a team decide on which policies is the most important and rank them in descending orders.

For example, you might decide the following policy must be followed at all time: “We always conduct research on new features or when we work on project that lasts longer than x month” while the next one is negotiable: “all designs should follow the latest design system unless an exception has been obtained”. 

This way, you communicate effectively to your team what is strategically important and you can focus your effort on battles that are meant to be won and be okay to lose the less important ones without diverging from the big picture.

9. Make sharing your work your top priority

Share your work constantly instead of doing it as an after-thought — It is not other people’s job to know what you do. It is YOUR JOB to sell yourself and to educate other people the value of design, how it can help the business and how it can help THEM. 

In a big corporate, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound. One of the mistake I had was not putting enough time to selling our team to the wider organization, so our team are essentially invisible to the higher ups. Not good. As a manager, if you learned that your team didn’t have time to share their work because they are busy, guess what? It is your job to do it now. As mentioned in Point 2 above, this is essential to the long term survival of your team.

Think strategically on who you want to sell your work to, which project to sell, what is the message, the communication channel, frequency and what is the ask for the audience. What call-to-action do you want this person to do? More funding for your team? Public praises? Show up in the next usability session? You want to make it clear. Spend more time to figure out how to best position yourself in the organization and you will have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder.

10. Find the best and learn from them

It’s a big company, it is full of very bright people. However, by nature of normal distribution, 90% of people are mediocre, 5% are top performers, the rest are waiting to get fired. Focus your time on the top 5%. Analyze what they do, how they sell themselves, how they do problem solving. What are they doing that you are not doing? How can you close that gap?

I don’t have the brightness mind in the company, but it doesn’t matter. I can observe good people and learn from them. I used to keep a journal of top performers of the company and I constantly ask myself what is their mindset, what are they doing right now, and what would they do in this tough situation? 

If you are able to articulate WHY someone is good, WHAT makes them good and HOW you can close that gap, you will have a great lead in personal development.

Evidence based imposter syndrome framework

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The other day I was chatting with a recent design graduate, she felt like she is not a real UX designer yet because her course was not 100% focused on UX. She wasn’t sure whether she should be considered a UX designer — she had an “imposter syndrome”. As designers, we are no strangers to this.

So how do I handle Imposter Syndrome? Here is what worked for me and what I told her:

I want you to turn your feelings into action. You are not allowed to feel incompetence unless you can prove it.

I call this the “Evidence based imposter syndrome”

Why did I say that?

The principle is simple: Innocent until proven guilty. Feeling alone doesn’t help you solve the problem.

Maybe your portfolio suck. Maybe you are not a real designer. Maybe you don’t know anything about design and you are faking it.

Who knows? Until you find data to backup your claim, you don’t know what is the reality. You can do this by either talking to someone senior or look up what is the expectation for the next role online.

  • I feel like an imposter is not a fact.
  • I am an imposter IS A FACT.

If you found out that you are are actually incompetent — an imposter — NOW you can feel sad, but you should also be excited. Why? Because now you have a tangible goal. You can close the knowledge gap if you know what they are, but you can’t act on “feeling competent” when there is no substance.

This simple framework worked for me for my whole career. From becoming a Senior all the way to becoming a Design lead. Each step of my career I always felt like I weren’t ready for these roles. So I asked myself: What does a competent Senior/Manager/Lead does? Let me find out! Am I there yet? If not, how can I close those gaps?

The Imposter Syndrome will always come to you. Expect it. When it does, try this “Evidence based imposter syndrome” framework and turn your feelings into action.

Comment and let me know if this method works for you!

How to design your own UX process

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If you search for “UX process”, you can find thousands of articles written on this topic. As a new UX person joining a team with no established process, you might be struggled on whom process to follow. I have been there before, and it was confusing.

The problem with following someone else’s framework is that it hardly sticks in your mind and it is easy to misuse it if you don’t fully understand it (As everyone worked in an “Agile” environment can testify). Since each company’s internal process and its UX maturity is different, it is hard to just pick one popular UX process and follow it.

In this article, I am going to walk you through a list of questions you should ask yourself in order to lead a design project from start to finish, and also explain why these questions are important. Based on these questions, you can form your own process that will suit yourself and your company.

Lets deep dive into this.

What problems are we solving?

Before you start designing anything, you need to understand WHY are you doing what you are being asked to do. If you don’t know what you are trying to solve, you can’t judge whether your design solves the problem or not.

Sometimes we are scared to ask why, the environment might make us feel like it is not politically correct to do so because it feels like we are questioning decision from higher up. Our boss might say or think “Why are you asking why? Do you think I made the wrong call? Can’t you just do as I say?”

Decorative image on: Consider what are you trying to solve

The problem with the word “Why” is that it is not welcoming, it feels like an interrogation. It focuses on questioning the person that made the request instead of the intention of the task. Instead, I advocate for using the word “What”. Consider the following:

1. Why are you using blue?

2. What are you trying to achieve by using blue?

“Why” seems like you are questioning someone’s decision, it can be interpreted as “Blue is a bad choice” where “What” invites for participation, it is a discussion: “What is your goal and how does blue help you achieve it?”. Now that we are comfortable asking What, here are some things you should ask when a task is handed to you:

  • What problem are we trying to solve and for whom? What are the pain-points?
  • What do users currently do without our solution? Did they invent some workarounds? This is an important question because if your problem is real and painful enough, people will try to find a workaround for it. Conversely, if you don’t see a workaround, the problem probably is not painful enough. Microsoft Excel does this really well. They basically look at what popular micro is being created and added it to their next release. This exercise helps you eliminate the imaginary problem like “some people might find this annoying” and give you a glimpse on how your design might end up. Sometimes your user’s hacky workaround is a great solution that requires minor modification.
  • What triggers us to solve this problem now? Understand the thought process of your boss will help you greatly as you can tie it to how you present your work. When you understand your boss better, you can feel his frustration or her urgency, and it helps you to avoid presenting a solution that takes 3 months to build when what you boss wants is a hot fix in 2 weeks.

Output

By the end, you should produce some sort of documentation that outline:

  • Why this project exists
  • What are the requirements

I like to add this knowledge into a document called a Project brief and keep it in a share drive such that there is a single source of truth, and I would also email stakeholders as well to keep everyone on the same page. Surprisingly, once it is written down, things become more concrete, and stakeholders are less likely to change their mind.

What is the scope?

Nothing gets done if there is no deadline. There is always room for improvement, there is always the next “minor polishing”. This article itself is also a product of setting a deadline and just hit the publish button whether I like it or not.

Decorative image on: Schedule

I can always come back for the typo or add a picture or two, but if I don’t publish anything, no one can read it, and I can’t add value to anyone’s life. For your project, get everyone involved and ask:

  • How much time do we have? Are we expecting a quick-win or a total redesign? There is no point in designing the perfect solution that takes 2 months if you only have 2 weeks to work on it. Instead, spend your time coming up with a perfect 2 weeks solution.
  • What does good enough look like? When do we know when to stop? At a minimum, your design should satisfy some bare-bone goals. i.e. The user should be able to add items to their cart. Any other good to have stuff like “comparison feature” or “add to my favorite” are Good-to-haves.
  • What use-cases or target user is not covered as part of this project? Having alignment on what you are not doing is just as important as knowing what needs to be done. Make sure this is well communicated to your stakeholders to avoid an unpleasant surprise in the future. e.g. Boss: I thought we are also curing cancer with this release and have already told the higher-ups, now I need to get everybody OT to work on this!

Output: MVP documentations, Out of scope documentation

Has anyone solved this problem before?

There is always more problems to solve than time available, as a smart designer, you want to avoid reinventing the wheel. First, you need to find out has the wheel already been invented. This means:

  • Look inward. Internally, has any teams within your organization faced this problem and solved this? Is it applicable to your case? Is there something we can reuse? Failure to do this step is how inconsistent designs, duplicated pattern and wasted effort occurs. If you company is big enough, someone else from another department has probably solved this before. Make sure they are aware your project exist and talk to them.
  • Externally, how did other companies solve this problem? This goes without saying, if you work in a FinTech, look for what other Fintech company is doing, if you work in e-commerce, look at what other similar company is doing and so on. What can we learn from them? What can we apply to our case? What are they not doing well that should we avoid?

Output: Case-study, Lesson-learned

How does the existing stuff work?

If you are adding a new feature on top of an existing design, you better know how the thing works inside out, or you might break things. Look at existing documentations, play around with the live site, and speak to developers to find out about any tricky logic, interactions or quick fix from the past that has been put together that is vulnerable to big changes.

Decorative image on: Two guys discussing on a document

What is our solution?

Now we start to design the actual thing. You can create sketches, lo-fi wireframe or hi-fi designs, prototypes…etc. It really depends on what you think is best for your company. During this process, consider:

  • What are the different scenarios and use cases? What would your design look in other languages? What does it look like on different screen sizes? Different platforms?
  • What happens when users don’t follow “the right way?” Have we covered all edge cases? If users can add one item to the basket, can they add 300? What does it look like if they do that? Do we allow it? If not, how does the UI convey that to the user? How long are items stored in the basket? Do we need to tell that information to the user? Why or Why not?
  • What are our rationales to make certain decisions? Throughout the design process, we are going to learn a lot of things and make a lot of decisions, are we just going to let that sit in our brain or are we going to make the effort to document it such that other designers and future generations can benefit from our lessons?
  • If we propose this design, does it also impact other areas of the existing design? Who needs to know about this? Other designers? Other developers? Other product managers? Do they have resource to support you?

Output: End-to End user flow, High-level sketch, Decision log, Interactive prototype

How do we know our solution works?

A design proposal is considered feasible when it, at a minimum:

  • Achieves the business goal
  • Can be built within a reasonable time-frame
  • Can be understood by the user

This means two types of people need to look at our work:

  • Internal people — Stakeholders
  • External people — Customers/Users
Decorative image on: A women thinking

Has our internal people agreed to this?

Do developers thinks your design is feasible? Does it require a big change to existing code base? How long would it take? Are there other simpler way to achieve 80% of the result but can take much less time?

Do other designers think we are following the established guidelines? If the design is not part of the guideline, do we need to update the guidelines?.

Do product people think the design achieved their goal? Do brand people think the design is on brand? If you are working on FinTech or highly regulated industry, have you consulted Subject Matter Experts or Legal or any relevant people to make sure your design complies to regulations? e.g. Can you create a One-click to order button?

How much time does the approval process take from all of these people mentioned above? Did the project plan take into account the back and forth? One of the major reason for project slip is that project plan failed to recognize that takes time for people to come into consensus. This won’t happen to you as a smart designer, you will make sure to bring this up during meetings and talk to the right people.

Output: Review session, approval log

Do customers understand our design?

Normally, we want to make sure the answer is Yes to this question before the product goes live. Until we test our designs to the real people who are going to use it, the designs are not validated and we are living in our own bubbles.

In a lot of companies, testing is always thought as a luxury, but the nature of it doesn’t change. Users has to test it no matter what. If you don’t test the design before launch, the shift just became after launch. We are testing the live product to real customers instead of prototypes. Anyway, if we are commit to test before launch, we need to figure out:

  • What format do we want to test? Sketches? Lo-fi/Hifi wireframes? Prototype?
  • Who to test? How long does the recruiting takes? How many people do we need? Who runs the test?
  • How much time does it take for us to organize the findings? How do we present our findings? In what format? To whom? What do we expect to do with our findings?

Output: Usability testing

What do people downstream need?

Now that our designs are ready, it is time to send it to someone else to work on it. Branding people might want to pick the right images, copywriters need to know which area needs copy. In an ideal case, everybody required to make the project happen are involved during the inception of design, if not, we need to spend some time to explain to them how the thing works.

Decorative image on: People discussing around a document

Consider: When will they need it? In what format? Are there enough time for them to review the design and ask questions? For example, you need to tell them:

  • For Copywriter, this area needs a new copy, and we are trying to tell the user about how x works
  • For Branding people, this area needs some stock photo, and we are trying to do y
  • For Developers, this area we are re-using existing component and this area requires new ones, and this is how the animation should work

In some companies, someone else is charged of figuring this out for you, but if that someone does not exist, it is on you. In essence, make sure people downhill knows what it is expected of them and in a format that they understand.

Output: Final UX & UI specifications.

How do you know the design is properly implemented?

Once developers has build something, how are you going to find out it looks and works as you specified? Do you communicate with QA people on what to look out for?

If you are going you review the build, how will you do it? Are you going to eye-ball it? Or use Chrome Developers tools to look at the elements? What if it is a mobile app? What tools should you use than?

How much time do you need for the review? Where do you report the bugs? How do you report the bugs? Are everything tracked and documented?

That’s everything I can think of that requires you to think about when you want to see through a design from beginning to launch. Hope this article helps you in your process and please leave a comment if you have any questions.

p.s. I am aware that product development is a continuous cycle and the design shouldn’t stop when a product is launched. But as the scope of this article is about seeing through from start to launch, what after launch is out of scope.

Decision log

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Imagine joining a UX team as the new designer wanting to learn about the product. There are two ways you can do it without taking your colleague’s time: you study the live product, or you read documentations about it. The most common form of design documentations are Wireframes. However, a wireframe only tells you part of truth, it tells you what design decisions has been made, it tells you the what, but it doesn’t tell you the why.

When we work on a project, we would have made a lot of design decisions based on user needs, stakeholder needs, research findings, time constrains, technology limitations.. the list goes on and on. If we don’t document these decisions down, we will be in a dangerous position where important project knowledge exists only in some designer’s memory. If that designer has moved on, the knowledge will be lost forever.

Without understanding the why, designers are forced to guess why things were designed that way. Every time we make a change, it is a gamble. The only solution is to systematically document project decisions, such that if future designers decides to make a change, they will have the right tools and context to help them make an informed decision. Let me introduce a tool that not only minimize design risks, but can also help you build a more mature UX organization — The Decision Log.

Benefits of a Decision Log

A decision log helps us to:

  • Remember things — When we write decisions down, we made sure we will have a reliable source of truth we can always refer back to it without forgetting it
  • Save time — By documenting what worked and what doesn’t, we made sure future designers will not waste time exploring dead-ends
  • Avoid going into circles — When we are exploring design options, it is easy to go back to square one and forget why we discarded it. When decisions is clearly documented, we made sure this won’t happen
  • Past on knowledge to others — When knowledge is written down, we are slowly building a library of knowledge where everyone can benefit and absorb it on demand

How to create a Decision Log

A decision log is a simple one pager document that sits inside the project folder. It has 3 components:

  • Screenshot
  • Decisions made
  • Rationale

That’s it. It really is that simple, now that every design you made is traceable and other people will no longer need to guess why you made that decision. The concept is not novel, our best friend — Developers does it all the time when they add comments to their code. Similarly, you should start writing a Decision log entry whenever a decision is made that will significantly impact the design, and you continue to do it through the project.

When in doubt, err on the side on over communication. The bad case scenario of writing something obvious is that readers ignores your sentence. The worse case scenario of not documenting a rationale is that you also forgot why you made that decision, then that information is lost forever.

Conclusion

As agile development and the introduction of Sprint has became the norm in every technology company, people seems to forget the true essence of the methodology is to learn quickly, not just do things quickly. The most efficient way to record and pass on that learning is to write it down. I hope you give this method a try and I can’t wait to hear from you the results!