Product Design

1/ After months of nonstop building amidst turnover and settling product direction I took advantage of a production down-cycle to put my design management hat back on and revamped our entire product design process at @decentdao. I want to share some of the key decisions and frameworks that went into this work so you can apply them to your projects. 🧵

DAOs and onchain orgs, it's time to accelerate. Govern at startup speed. 

www.decentdao.org

2/ First, my background is in brand management, so product design is still fairly new to me. When in doubt (or unfamiliar territory), always reach for a proven framework. Starting today, we have adopted the classic Double Diamond framework to guide our design process.

For months I watched myself and my team go in circles without any clear guard rails to understand where we were at in understanding the problems we needed to solve to ship pretty massive new features. We struggled to communicate internally and plug our dev team in to get the right technical feedback while we unpacked possible solutions.

Without any proper process in place, the Double Diamond is a perfect framework to introduce. It follows designers' natural tendencies to diverge and converge throughout the design process and surfaces clear gates that need to be crossed to push progress to the next steps.

Are there better frameworks for product teams these days? Sure, but it doesn't make sense to introduce a ton of complexity at the early on.

ATL raised. 🐦‍🔥 // Design, music, coffee, bikes, community. //
Designing at @decentdao

3/ The Double Diamond is the bedrock on which I based the rest of Figma our file and page structures. Moving forward we will now have a file for every major feature (photo left). No more mega file for everything under the sun (photo right). We still maintain a single aggregate handoff file and a single design system file (this may change in the future).

Pros:
- Easier to contain and manage related design efforts around features.
- Teams can work on separate features without competing for space. 
- Easier to collaborate with dev and product for review cycles.
- Scales into folders as features mature and are grouped together.

Cons:
- Multiple files to manage.
- Without proper grouping of features or user flows, can scale horizontally to extremes.
- Increased admin overhead.

4/ Each design file now follows the design process from most collaborative to least collaborative, top to bottom. Pages closer to the top are more polished and involve multiple stakeholder reviews. Pages closer to the bottom leave room for designers to be messy and explore. The idea was to create enough structure to facilitate creativity, not get in its way.

At @decentdao we have regularly scheduled design reviews and bi-weekly (sometimes weekly) review with cross-functional stakeholders. Design reviews encourage us to dig deeper into problems, provide feedback, and collaborate deeper together. Cross-functional reviews help us ensure we're meeting product requirements, keeping our devs looped in to our design thinking, and are able to communicate any intended functionality as early as possible.

Having fewer pages (and sections) to manage overall, and isolate containers for more formal review will keep devs (and even us) from hunting around and guessing which are the latest designs to base their decisions on

5/ Finally, within our pages I created new guidelines for building userflows with better labels and context for reviewers. Mobile and desktop screens are neatly separated (we're a mobile-first design team btw 😘). Userflows are built left-to-right, top-to-bottom with enough spacing to provide additional callouts and give the eyes room to breathe before moving onto additional states or screens.

New Sections are only created when there is a new "round" of design to be done. New Pages are only created when the work has reached a significant departure in concept or execution from the existing work.

During exploration, the rules can of course be bent because we are often moving and ideating really fast. But as we approach the final convergence in our Double Diamond, there shouldn't be any guesswork to figure out where designs are and what they're communicating. Again, facilitate creativity without getting in its way.

Above all else, this is an experiment we're starting today. I'm excited to be done. My team is excited to have frameworks. And we're going to keep adjusting how this works to fit our needs any time we run into roadblocks.

As with all process and frameworks, there is no single best solution. In fact, I built this system by pulling pieces from a variety of free online resources. All of this is meant to be is a guide to get us from A to B much faster, and much more confidently.

I still have some documenting to do internally, but I would like to convert these resources into a community file that outlines this process in the near future. But for now, let me know what you think and where I left open any gaps in my thinking.

If you want to adopt parts of this system for your team, holler at me and let's work together!

Building /farcastle. Tryna help humans coordinate. Just /yeet it. TANSTAAFL! https://bootleggers.wtf/

When you're ready, hold review sessions with design and/or cross-functional stakeholders. Set expectations up front that you want to start to narrow down toward defining a problem/solution or that you are seeking perspective to explore viable solutions.

Your divergent steps will likely be primarily your design team and convergent steps will include other stakeholders to arrive at key decisions.

How do you get everyone aligned with whether you are in a phase of divergence or convergence?