Improving Product Team Process to Create Better Design

Or, how can we structure our process to create the opportunity for good design

Nick Bewley, June 25, 2014

Good Design

• What is it not? — Not “Flashy” or “Hip”

• What it is:— Functional— Usable

ie. Relevant Information is easily discoverable by users

What do you see here?

Yes, a swiss army knife

But.. further than that, what is a swiss army knife?

Versus:

We want:

We have:

Why has our swiss army knife lost its usability?

Conway’s Law• organizations which design systems ... are

constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

i.e. Conway’s Law Applied to

CrossCap

Current Communication Patterns

Conway’s Law Applied toCrossCap

ETC, ETC, ETC, ETC, ETC

Functionality B

Functionality C

Functionality D

Functionality A

Conway’s Law Applied toCrossCap (in detail)

Why?

• Design has no visibility into the functionality we are trying to achieve at a high level

• Imagine designing a car: taking the steering wheel from a Taurus, the frame of a Civic, the seats from an Escalade, etc.. Everything could be well designed individually, but putting all these things together creates an unusable product.

Current Communication Patterns

=

Overcomplicated Swiss Army Knife that we are trying to fix

How to fix the feature creep?

We want:

• How to achieve?• Individual use cases and limited

product focus =

For Example• If I design for a use case for sharing assets from the

GIC individually

• Then perhaps I design for a use case for sharing offers from Global Offers individually

• In reality, the two should be unified from a design perspective. i.e. both represent a sharing function

What customers really want

How to create a functional Swiss Army Knife?

Agile Product Ownership applied to CrossCap

Agile Product Ownership applied to CrossCap’s documentation materials

Agile Product Ownership applied to CrossCap