For me, design is the trigger of usability on whatever technology and psychology is the trigger to ensure that this design is human-centered.
Since 2019, I have been part of the Product team that have designed and built from scratch the neo-broker Ninety Nine, an app and its web version that break down the the barriers to entry to the investment market, such as high fees and complexity. Working in a startup from its inception offers a unique opportunity to gain significant experience in how a product and a company is built from the ground up. You always have multiple roles within your position, you are always responsible for more than just the role as product designer. It is an aspect that I have always liked about working in a startup. Working in a project from scratch also means being able to be flexible and embrace change. You learn to be comfortable with constant change and to develop more initiative and self responsibility. Being part of a startup from its inception you see how you contribute directly to the success of the product and the company, it offers a much more complete experience of what it really means to build a digital product.
My work lives at the intersection of design & psychology.
Placing emphasis on analysis phase (research, understand and ideation). Making impossible to ignore the human side in the development of technology.
When designers are asked to solve problems unable to pay attention to users (their cognitive reasoning, their behavior, their context, their problems or motivations…) the design is prevented from being more useful or usable than it was to be with. And what I really want to design is usefulness and delightfulness.
Without a solid Product Design process, you have a lower chance of creating a product with good UX. Design process is essentially a decision-making process in which analytical tools lead us to a much better solution than an arbitrary solution.
One of the most important phases in Product Design is actually done before the product team creates anything. Before I can build a product, I need to understand its context. The analysis phase sets the foundation for the final product. During this phase, I research around the problem or the need at the highest level (basically, the concept of the product) with users and stakeholders.
Seasoned product designers think of research as a good investment: good research informs design decisions and investing in research early in the process can save a lot of time and money down the road.
When users’ wants, needs, problems and expectations from a product are clear, as product designer I move to the design phase. At this step, I work on various activities, from ideation, creating information architecture (IA) to the actual UI design. An effective design phase is both highly collaborative (it requires active participation from all team players involved in product design) and iterative (meaning that it cycles back upon itself to validate ideas).
The design phase usually includes user tests with the high-fidelity prototypes, since testing with high-fidelity designs provides more valuable feedback from end-users. During a series of user testing sessions, we can validate the product with both stakeholders and end-users.
Dev. is an essential step in the design process because it helps teams understand whether their design works for their users. Usually, the dev. phase starts after the high-fidelity design is ready. But Product Design isn’t a linear process; it’s an iterative process. The phases of the Product Design process have considerable overlap and usually there is a lot of back-and-forth. It’s important to accept the fact that the design it's just a hypothesis, at the end Product Design process is to actually build a prototype of the solution to validate it, uncover the “real-world” effects that solution.
My dev. phase of the Product Design process may include the following activities:
- Development using agile methodologies (scrum).
- QA testing
- Realeases to production
- User tests
- Monitoring of KPIs and product metrics.
As a notepad, I am collecting here some ideas that express a little better my way of understanding product design.
