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Nicolaus
@nicolaus
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. 🧵
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Nicolaus
@nicolaus
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.
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Nicolaus
@nicolaus
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.
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Nicolaus
@nicolaus
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
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