What does your ideal product design process look like?

My ideal process is broken into a few parts.

1. Research: What would make a good product. Who are your users, what are your goals?
2. Development: Now that you know your options, userbase, etc, it’s time to brainstorm. Iterative design processes help as does listing ideas out, chatting with others. This may be a sketch, a prototype, or a mock product.
3. Refine: The refinement stage is time to try variations, try new combinations and to really hone in on solving your problem. You may involve user testing or generative design.
4. Production: This stage is all about getting things finished and polishing the final product. This may include working with partners and vendors, a special release, making sure the details are getting finished properly, etc.
5. Testing: Now it’s time to makes sure your product lives up to it’s name. Are the standards met? Does the product hold up to testing, scaling, reproduction? Will your users use the product?
6. Release: You have to give people the key to the bus! You have to let your users know your product is coming, a date, marketing, materials, documentation. Without the key to the bus the dang thing won’t even run!
7. Follow up: Once your release is finished it’s time for a retrospective. What went well? What did users really like? Do they need support? Are there bugs? Follow through is very important for maintaining a happy customer base!

What are your absolute requirements?

I think every great product starts with the why. There has to be a need, want, utility or reason. Second, a great product has a great strategy behind it. By breaking the product design life cycle into steps it allows for certain areas to have focus.

What are your nice to haves?

My nice to haves are weighted based on their importance. Time management becomes extremely important. Rating the importance of features can help you determine how to manage your time. I generally favor function over form. It has to work well and complete the task first and then look great!

Tell us about a design system you’ve built. How did your design process inform its development?

Most recently I built a Work From Home app for my current company. The app was designed to synch to the employee’s Outlook calendar. It used a service integration alongside a client side UI built within Sharepoint. It also used a custom branding css file that can be included in all of our projects. The app was designed so that multiple dates could be entered at one time. The dates would then get sent to the employee’s manager and once approved would show on their outlook calendar for the entire company to see. Being a hybrid work from home environment, those dates could change each week, but their could only be two in one week. Requirements were important and so were allowing exclusions.

The design process was done through prototyping an overall layout and then individually working through each tab. Each week the prototype was shown to the executives and the features were thought over and reviewed. It led to important discoveries and new rules/requirements.

What do you feel it did well, and what could it have done better?

The app worked really well with sending dates to outlook and to allow employees and managers to see their schedule as “Working elsewhere”. The app was easy to update and worked off a json REST model in order to deal with requests. If anything could have been done better it would be making sure the employee records were up to date in AD. But the app solved one more issue! Many managers were not correct in AD and the entire process allowed employee’s to discover this.

How did it change your thinking for the next one you build?

The next iteration included features such as manager comments, better exclusion handling, better email notifications, and a faster overview calendar within the app. It made me realize how important design really was. Some features were very intuitive and easy to use while others could have been improved and made easier for users. Overall it highlighted the need for a great user experience that was simple and intuitive!

What’s a product whose design inspired you so much you had to talk to somebody else?

As a programmer I would definitely say ChatGPT. I mentioned it to my co-workers because I could see the potential immediately. As we dug in more we discovered GitHub Co-pilot. Wow! What a great product with so many use-cases. It certainly changed the world.

What was so great about it?

It was helping me in so many ways! As a technologist and musician, there were many things it did well for me!

• Code linting
• Code generation
• Writing help (Chat GPT was not used in my process writing these answers, though I was tempted to use it!)
• Knowledge summaries
• Music progression generator
• Lyric writing tool

It was obvious what a great tool chatGPT would be in my life. While it may not have all the answers and can sometimes be wrong, it is great for the things I listed above and has been a great help to me in my career and life.

What’s a product whose design drove you a bit crazy?

I can think of few but one service in particular comes to mind. Facebook Live. Facebook Live is a great tool and I am not here to down it but it has one feature that has caused some confusion for us Apple users. Streaming in landscape mode while using my iPhone wasn’t working properly.

What was wrong with it?

Although Facebook Live showed the correct orientation it streamed the wrong orientation and the video was sideways. I tried removing the screen lock prior to going live and still no change. It turns out the fix was much simpler than I thought! In order to do landscape mode on an iPhone, you must change one setting that is not at all obvious. That setting is Display View Zoom. Setting the value to “Standard” under the display and brightness setting was not at all obvious. It drove me crazy that it was something so simple but yet seemingly unrelated!

What would I change?

I think there are a few options here depending on the programming.

1. A true fix will take some extra QA, regression testing and specific device tests.
2. Warn the user when this setting is enabled. (If possible)
3. Let Facebook know of the issue and your frustration with it. Submit a bug fix and alert the team! They may not be aware of the issue.