I had the pleasure of hosting a recent Smashing Magazine workshop on product design, subbing for Vitaly Friedman who usually runs these things.
What? A front-ender interviewing really smart people about their processes for user research, documenting requirements, and scaling teams around usability? I was a product designer once upon a time and even though it’s been a long time since I’ve flexed that muscle, it was a hoot learning from the guests, which included: Chris Kolb, Kevin Hawkins, and Vicky Carmichael.
The videos are barred from embedding, so I’ll simply link ’em up directly to YouTube:
- Chris Kolb: All Users Are Stupid
- Kevin Hawkins: Scaling International User Research
- Vicky Carmichael: Design By Doing
I also moderated a follow-up discussion with Chris and Kevin following the presentations.
A few of my choice takeaways:
- Small teams have the luxury of being in greater, more intimate contact with customers. Vicky explained how their relatively small size (~11 employees) means that everyone interfaces with customers and that customer issues and requests are handled more immediately.
- Large teams have to be mindful of teams forming into individual silos. A silo mentality typically happens when teams scale up in size, resulting in less frequent communication and collaboration. Team dashboards help, as do artifacts from meetings in multiple formats, such as AI-flavored summaries, video recordings, and documented decisions.
- Customers may appear to be dumb, but what looks like dumbness is often what happens when humans are faced with a lack of time and context. Solving “dumb” user problems often means coming at the problem in the same bewildered context rather than simply assuming the customer “just doesn’t get it.”
Smashing Meets Product Design originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
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