Designing Products Holistically | Adyen Lead Product Designer | Olga Mishyna

[Music] [Applause] have you ever tried to organize a holiday for five people who live in three different countries two couples one single person weapons person with glutar intolerance two people who get seasick one person who gets carsick few people who wants to have lazy beach style holiday few people who wants to go for their active sightseeing you need to think about budgets uh who's going to drive um how are you going to fly where you're gonna meet it's gonna be morning flights or evening flights you all have to request dares at work you're gonna book through airbnb or booking.com this is exactly the same problem as we all face at work as designers but first a little bit about myself hi my name is olga i'm a lead product designer at rdn i've been working there for a year and a half so far i've been living in amsterdam for almost a decade and this is what my friends still think i'm doing here this is what my parents think i'm doing here this is what i'd like to believe i'm doing here and this is what i'm actually doing driving through the rain in wind every day to the office but back to the topic i'm gonna tell you uh three stories my personal experience and the few learnings that i got from there i hope you will also find it very useful as i did so first to the story a it's one of my adventures where i got a chance to learn quite a lot imagine a big cargo ship so you're a driver i don't think you can say driver of cargo ship anyway you're a driver of a big cargo ship you're going full speed on and in the middle of the way someone tells you you need to turn 180 degrees back it's gonna be really hard now imagine you're in a speedboat turning backwards doesn't look that hard anymore changing direction on the speedboat easy so my point is that changing a way of work of individual team is way easier than changing of work of the whole company so in this bank where i was working the company decided to switch to agile way of working and instead of imposing this new methodology on the whole company immediately they started with a smaller or like on the lower level with individual teams and big companies they are really full of inertia and startups are so successful because they're like speed boats they can change their direction anytime they want so introducing introducing changes to in small and familiar beats to individual teams became a key success for the general change of culture in this company we managed to add the startup five in our big company so this bank decided to work with the spotify model if you're not familiar spotify model works this way designers product owners front-end developers back-end developers researchers whoever is set for the challenge put into a squad a bunch of squads form a tribe so in this bank i was working with the wholesale tribe and with security tribe a bunch of designers across different squads form a chapter the chapter can be also formed by developers for example or researchers sometimes people form a guild it's basically people across different chapters and different squads they group together depending on the challenge they have so i was put to work with two different squads as a part of this new way of working the idea was that designers and their processes will become a part of the development cycle it means that all my tasks were put in jira part as a part of the ticketing system it also means that all estimations of time and effort were done by including everything that i was doing as i was working with two different tribes in two different squads i realized that maturity level of different teams was very different and at first it was actually a real struggle because developers didn't always understood what they should expect from me i didn't um always my expectation didn't always match with whatever they were doing and it was kind of complicated and hard but after we acknowledge the fact that we have this communication issue and we are accepted that we will need time to adjust to the new way of working and we need to have an open and transparent communication this really helped our teams to grow it actually had kind of a spillover effect other teams saw how we are working and how it impacts our processes and they were more open to adopt new methodology themselves unfortunately change is not always easy if not everyone is willing participate when business goals are overtaking user goals and team goals things will go south so in our case some business goals were introduced and business didn't really consult that much with the developers teams and with their product owners and new priorities were introduced team priorities were moved aside and things started to get postponed that was the moment when i actually left what i learned from this experience one of the biggest things that i exp like learned there is basically was about the user testings this bank had its own um testing lab so it means that we usually would invite users tests we had two rooms as normal good testing lab what i managed to do that time i invited developers to my user testings and i had sort of like epiphany sort of like enlightenment moment when i saw developers sitting in this other room without harassing my users um so they were sitting there on this and they were watching on the screen how users are interacting with the interface that we implemented some changes there together with the developers and they saw how those small changes were having this enormous impact on the user experience that the user was experiencing in the other room and they were able empathize not only with the user but also they were able to understand how i'm working as a designer so the learning is that we need to invite other team members to our user testings we need to involve them at different stages of their our processes and if we don't have possibility if we don't have such luxury as a testing lab and we need to present results of our research we should not present it uh just as a dry fact we need to create some kind of a compelling story with a lot of details complexity create some sort of a protagonist so the developers could empathize with the user and be more willing to work together with you now to my story b i call it as a how to start a development riot do you know why you cannot have sex on the red square too many advisors no one really likes to be told what to do so they didn't like people in this bank when external agency that board actually hired came with a ready-made solution i joined this company when the process was already ongoing for two years this external agency arrived as the knight on the shining armor with their shiny designs ready to solve all the problems they didn't really consult with the users they didn't really talk to teams inside the bank they in general they didn't try to understand what they were solving so fresh look is not a design requirement at least not the one that we should follow so this approach raised more questions than it's actually answered delivering a static design that lives on its own in a vacuum is it was a very bad idea so it became like a small scale riot on development side so from one side um your designs should be buildable developers should feel excited about whatever challenge you're bringing for them the other thing all the estimations that were brought by this agency they literally went to trash because they never consulted with developers so they were not able to create uh some realistic timeline so as a result this so-called fresh look update got stretched for years and uh the designs got frankenstein halfway through by the in-house teams so this agency what they really failed to do without besides the design they actually failed to establish relationship um according to science relationship is actually built on the three pillars the first pillar is the power and control it's not necessarily that the agency took wrong decisions but they took these decisions without people inside the bank they didn't involve them the second pillar is the care and closeness it didn't feel like they were building this solution together with the developers and the in-house teams they didn't feel like they cared about them at all and the third is the respect and recognition this agency didn't show that they were valuing or like uh accepting or acknowledging their efforts that this uh bank already had the teams from this bank already had so what i learned to do better next time if i'm external i would try to go to my client as early as i can and talk not only to the business and product managers but also to developers these people know products from inside out and if i'm internal i will try to run design sprints by involving very different stakeholders everyone who possibly can give me some useful information and maybe this design screens are not going to help to uncover all the questions but it definitely will help to set the right ones so how all this is related to my holiday remember that story five people three different countries it's all about communication to understand what other people want do expect you to do we really need to talk to each other i was able to organize an amazing holiday that we still think during the cold winters about only because we set up a group chat as a very close friend and we were able to talk honestly about what we want and what we expect from these holidays we're not deliberate we cannot read other people's minds and we also cannot know everything in the world we remember it very well when it comes to the users but somehow we tend to forget it when it comes to our teammates we're contributing to a product as a whole so we need to approach our work holistically this is how i actually wanted to call my talk but my colleague pedro said it's too pretentious anyway i really like this word and i do believe it applies really well to what i'm trying to say according to the cambridge dictionary holistic means dealing with or treating the whole of something or someone and not just the part simply it means that everything isn't interconnected we are creating something together by connecting our works we're creating something that's just bigger than our small piece and our work doesn't exist on its own it's always a part of a whole and to be aware of what is happening on other levels to understand our dependencies we need to talk to each other we need to establish really good communication with each other our product is a whole it's never beats and pieces esther perel a belgian therapist in her talk uh the creative mornings said people are able to do their work because other people do their work it's almost never one person it's a group effort so now to my third experience and i feel like it's some part of a success success story it's a company where people really trying to follow this approach in their daily work so what we're doing differently i'm not going to surprise anyone saying that we have regular design reviews but what we do differently we invite non-designers to our design reviews these people always help to bring an amazing insights and help us to look at our problems from a different view as a designers we're trying not to be outsiders we're trying to incorporate designers at the core of every product team we participate in team plannings uh we participate in creation of quarterly and yearly goals and we empower collaboration this principle lies at the heart of work at idn people talk to each other a lot it could be just like a quick two minutes chit chat while you're standing in line for a coffee or it can be a whole day session when we fly to the other offices in other continents and try to understand how our colleagues work or for example we utilize the floor planning of course we we have mostly open floor plan and people really collaborate with each other different teams but when we have a task that team need to focus themselves and they need to collaborate within the team heavily we give them the entire floor just for themselves and they were able to deliver fast and right so the other story is about our idea and formulas and again we have idm formula it's basically a set of principles that we try to follow in our everyday work it's not just written on paper we actually do this the first one we don't hide behind email instead we pick up the phone we live and work across different time zones and continents and sometimes it feels like email would be a right solution for exchanging some information but if you can find this two minutes on the crossing of your time zones and have one call instead of exchanging 10 10 emails for a week you will get so much more first of all you will get the right information and the second you will stubble relationship the other formal that we have we talk straight without being rude i think it's kind of a dutch thing because with dutch company is this directness thing we try to say it as it is if it's good we acknowledge it if it's bad we will try to give you a constructive feedback this is where it's so important to have the right relationship with your teammate because if you get the rough feedback from a friend it will feel very different as getting rough feedback from a random person in the first place it will feel like this feedback comes from the place of care and support and in second place there is a big chance you will get defensive and dismiss the whole feedback even if it was right and the last formula that i want to mention we include different people to sharpen our ideas every team creates its own goals and priorities together designers are involved in development cycle design developers involved in design processes but this point goes beyond that we're also trying to make our team truly diverse it means that we not with like we don't hire just to tick the box for diversity but it's been proven again and again the teams that are diverse create better products and uh generally working better if you remember two things from today please remember this empathy is a very powerful tool we need to try to change people's minds and hearts one by one and it will have a ripple effect within your company eventually the culture will change and try to involve people with different backgrounds we all like unicorns we possess different experiences and unique knowledge together we can make way better products and there's a little bonus let's try not to make it perfect from the start as the churchill said success has ability to move from failure to failure without losing their enthusiasm it's an evolution not a revolution thank you

Channel: awwwards.

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Keywords: UX, E-COMMERCE, DESIGN THINKING, accessibility, websites, ecommerce, design, web design, digital design, designers, UI, business, ted talks, design talks, awwwards, awwards, awwwards conference, awwwards amsterdam, awwwards conference amsterdam, digital, technology, UX design, branding, female designer, fin tech, tech, user testing, web developer, front end developer, back end developer, product designer, user research, product design, digital products, interface design, UI Design

Id: Gl3c5qS8Nu4

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020