Practical learnings of a Product Designer
Hi folks! After a lot of contemplation, I am finally writing a blog as an attempt to share a few of my recent learnings, while working as a product designer.
Before we start, here’s a quick intro about me;
👋 I am a Fashion Designer turned self-taught Product Designer. I absolutely love crafting solutions for the users (currently farmers, at DeHaat) digitally. The entire process of finding or understanding a problem from scratch to crafting it into a simple digital solution excites me! Oh, and creating components with auto-layout on Figma feels like therapy :)
1- Don’t Shy away from iterations👩💻
As designers, We often find ourselves stuck in an “Endless Vicious design iteration cycle” and see no fruition of our hard work.
But over a period of time I have come to realize that great designs don’t just appear overnight — they take time to get right.
Most of the time, we start with a complex problem, and as we keep on solving it, step by step..., we devise a simple and usable solution.
In this journey of reaching the final solution, we come up with various ideas and prototypes, but most of them do not make the final cut due to various reasons:
- Tech constraints
- Changing business requirements or priorities
- Feedback from users
- Feedback from the business team
The reasons could be countless but what I am trying to say here is, that if you had not gone through these failures/improvisations/rejections during the design process itself…the final solution might not be the right one.
Being patient with the constructive feedback that you receive or any ideas that will help you improvise your solutions should always be welcome and never shy away from iterating your work.
2- Ask Questions🙋🏼♀️🙋
Asking the right questions is one of the most essential and crucial skills we designers need to possess.
Be it your product manager, developer, or the users…asking the right questions will always give us an opportunity to get more clarity around our work.
Asking the right questions is an art, to some, it comes naturally, and to some, it enhances over a period of time.
How does it help? Well, let’s understand through examples.
- Understanding the problem statement, expected outcomes, and where it sits in the bigger picture.
- Getting feedback from your product team and the users.
- Helps in understanding peer’s thought processes, which might lead us to learn something.
- Ideating various possibilities for the design.
So, what really is a good question? I came across a really informative blog about it so you folks can Check it out
3- Estimating time for your design projects⏳
How many times have you been completely confused about how that “quick project” turned into a never-ending loop of iterations?
Well, it has happened with most of us I guess. In my opinion, the way out of it is to ask several questions in the initial stage of the design project in order to get a clearer understanding of the project and find grey areas if any, before committing to any deadlines.
Understand the scope of the project explicitly, then estimate the time required for each of the design processes you are considering to execute, add a buffer time and then commit your estimated project delivery time.
4- Documentation✍️
Documenting your design process is an exceptionally important part of being a designer, not just for your organization but for yourself and your career growth.
Documenting your design projects:
From finding or understanding a problem to do research work, wireframes, doing to-and-fro changes after testing with the users, and rushing to meet deadlines as a product designer, we often turn a blind eye to documentation, only to regret it in the near future.
When we are assembling our projects to turn them into beautiful case studies. Or, when a project performs well, and the product team plans to work on Phase II, we have to go through the phase I project all over again, often forgetting numerous key points that affected our decision-making back in time.
My personal favorite for documentation is Notion!
Documenting your learning:
We talked about how essential it is to document your design projects. I believe, it is equally important to document your learnings every now and then you get time. It could be something as simple as jotting broad pointers in your notebook, documenting detailed topics on your favorite software, or writing a blog and sharing it with the design community.
Well, this is it for this time folks, see you the next time. Hope this article helped you in any possible way.🥰🤞🏻
Hit me on Linkedin in case any question pops up in your head.
