How to Create Your Design Process
Welcome to the Do-Over Project, where we interview young professionals about their struggles, processes, journeys and deliver it in a summarised version as well as help you connect with them to help you grow better professionally.
About The Speaker
Harshvardhan Singh is a product designer working at Swadesh, a Neo bank built for the Indian diaspora. He graduated in 2021 as an IT engineer but made a transition to the design industry by being a part of a design and media agency run by college students with over 20+ clients.
We have also written an article about how he became a product designer and the struggles he faced that you can read about here.
What is your thought process behind starting a new project?
HVS: I’d like to start by quoting Abe Lincoln “If I were tasked with chopping down a tree in 6 hours, I would spend the first 4 sharpening the axe”. This quote reminds me of the value of creating a process and understanding the problem before trying to deliver a solution.
Before I begin, let me clarify that everyone has their own way of tackling a problem and what I’m explaining below may or may not be the ideal way for you. You can always tweak the process to make it your own. Now, with that in mind, let me break down my process for tackling a problem.
The Research
Before tackling any problem or starting a project, I always figure out the following:
- Who my target audience might be?
- What do their problems look like?
- Existing apps that they use
- and how they solve it (or adjust to it) currently
For eg: If I were designing a food app, then I would look at Zomato and Swiggy and also enquire about people’s food ordering habits right from how much they order per week/month to how they do it step by step. This helps me to understand the depth of the problem and the user’s thinking.
Dumping Ground
I then start to dump my thoughts on a sheet of paper. I cannot stress how important and underrated this step is. Dumping your ideas (good or bad) helps you “unclog your brain” and give your more room to connect the dots and see the bigger picture. If you create 7 bad iterations of a screen, then the 8th one will surely be much better. Always remember, the bad designs will always lead to a good design so I highly recommend penning down everything.
The Feedback Loop
When starting out in my career, I wanted to impress the people around me and dazzle them with the final outcome. However, that outcome would often not solve the right problem and all my efforts would go to waste as I never requested feedback in the initial stages, fearing most people wouldn’t understand it.
This is now an integral part of my design process. After settling on the initial idea, I always approach the stakeholders of the project to discuss the problem and make sure that:
- We all have understood the problem clearly.
- I have taken all inputs regarding solutions and issues into consideration before I proceed with the best approach.
Once I settle on an appropriate solution, I sketch a wireframe and validate it with my internal stakeholders as well as the users. This is an important step before you create final designs as sometimes the solutions might make sense to you but not to another person. This process will help you clarify that and also provide feedback on how well you’re executing that solution.
Revision & Re-iteration
The final part of my process involves making minor adjustments to improve the technical feasibility before handing the designs over to the dev team. What I’ve learnt as a graphic designer is that, some designs just can’t be implemented in real life and are more of a concept than a solution.
To conclude, product design is an endless process of researching, designing, testing, deploying, and re-iterating.
So you say it’s an endless process and you can always improve on a design. How about giving our audience an example by reflecting back on one of your old projects and try improving on it?
HVS: Absolutely, I’d love to. So before I begin, there is something which I’d like to mention. When I was looking for my first job, I often tried to cram all my projects in to show the vast amount of work I did. You should always pick quality over quantity.
With that, let’s break down my old project called “Phyto” which won the NLP Summit Hackathon 2020. The reason is that despite it being the best entry in a global event, there is always room for improvement.
Disclaimer: I have already written an article about my design process for Phyto which you can read about here. For this section, I shall be only focusing on the areas of improvement.
The Problem Statement
The problem was that the farmers in developing nations like India lack resources and knowledge to fight crop diseases and apply the best farming techniques.
Areas of Improvement
Area 1 :
- This process could have been explained in an easier way, by using some simpler words like replacing mid-fidelity prototype to just prototype
- I could’ve also used bullets to differentiate between user survey and personas development as they are two separate steps in the discovery process
Area 2:
- This is straight-up overkill according to me. Don’t get me wrong, you need to understand your users in-depth, but conveying unnecessary info like motivations and location and area owned just confuses the other stakeholders collaborating with you.
- The user persona is not very useful in some cases and in the cases that it is, it should be displayed in a simple fashion that includes the user’s needs, actions and pain points.
Area 3:
- This is a big area of improvement. Back then, I tried to make the app as aesthetically pleasing as I could and ended up creating an app that looks beautiful to you, an educated person who uses many apps on a regular basis. However, for a farmer who doesn’t use apps daily, this is an overwhelming experience where the screen is popping up colours in all directions confusing me as to where I should look.
- There are also many unnecessary features like the weather forecast, humidity etc (3rd screen from the 2nd row) for which the farmer is used to using other resources like the news and probably won’t change that behaviour anytime soon.
- Finally, the chatbot which is supposed to be our core offering is placed at the bottom of the screen which requires 2 clicks to access. This means that our core offering is harder to access as compared to the side features.
- I would also increase the text size of the app as many farmers are old and don’t have the best eyesight.
- Finally, we should focus on the fact that farmers in developing nations are not highly educated and they are unlikely to be proficient in English so our app should have provided the option of using a Local Language.
So with that, I hope you can see the value of reiterating your designs. I bet that if I come back a year later, I can improve it further.
That was amazing. So before we conclude, do you have some closing statements or advice you’d like to the young audience?
HVS: Hahaha, It’s crazy to think that about a year back, I didn’t even know if I’d end up being a designer and now I’m being asked to give advice on how to be one. If I were to give some advice to my younger self, I’d tell him this:
- Don’t get too attached to a specific tool. Learn to adapt and explore but also don’t overwhelm yourself with them. Strike a balance.
- Having a good looking portfolio is not good enough. You need to tailor it to the company or the start-up you’re applying to. Put in a personal touch to show that you really care about joining the company.
- Always pick quality projects over quantity.
- Writing is an important part of the design. Write more.
- Reading is even more important. Some of the books I wish I’d read earlier on design are:
- Design of everyday things
- Hooked (Also subscribe to the author’s mailing list)
- Don’t make me think
- You can also check out these Podcasts: UI Breakfast Podcast & 99% Invisible
