It’s my absolute pleasure to see how the startup horizon in Bangladesh is changing rapidly. It’s such an amazing feeling seeing all these founders, with their beautiful ideas backed by remarkable funding, are working hard with real problems, and trying to come up with real solutions.
I’m here to talk about the process of designing those solutions and how we can hire the right designers to help us solve those problems.
Before I jump into the actual discussion, I want to stress why this is the right topic to discuss, especially now. While we are securing those amazing seed funds, we should also be careful about how we are allocating our resources. Based on the small survey I did a couple of days ago, the role of a product designer didn’t cut the top five most important roles in many tech startups. If my product is going to bring me the money, then let’s spend on building a great product. Shipping an average product while spending tons on marketing and sales might bring us the tractions we are aiming for. But what it won’t bring is good words of mouth, organic users, and a higher retention rate.
Let’s get back to the original discussion. Broadly speaking, a product designer is responsible for two distinct roles - planning and execution. And the entire design process is a loop of these two broad roles.
If I am to break down the process a bit further, I see the design process as a loop of five steps - Identifying a Problem, Researching about the Problem, Hypothesizing a Potential Solution, Prototyping based on the Hypothesis, and Testing on Potential Users. The first three fall under planning and the last two fall under execution.
Let’s discuss the steps in detail. I’m writing the following discussion from a lead product designer’s perspective.
Identifying the Problem
It starts with asking the right questions to the stakeholders. In other words, coming up with a problem statement. What is the problem we are trying to solve? Whom are we solving it for? Once we find the answers to these questions from the potential users and the product owners, we should have the problem statement ready.
Research
The next step is to do research. Once we identify the challenge or the problem we want to solve, we dive into the research to understand the problem better. This is where we give ourselves reality checks as well by asking questions like what are resources do we have at our disposal to craft a solution? Is there anyone else working on this problem? If so, how are they trying to solve it?
Hypothesize
As the last step of planning, we come up with a hypothesis as a potential solution. What might a hypothesis look like? A hypothesis can look like this: Building X feature in Y manner will result in Z where Z is the desired outcome from users.
Prototyping
This is the first part of the execution. Once we have the hypothesis ready, we design the X feature in Y manner and come up with mockups and prototypes. This is where we pretty much play with tools like Figma and Sketch.
Testing: As the final part of the execution, we test the mockups and prototypes with potential users and start gathering data. As we gather data through experimentation using prototypes, we analyze the data and identify any trend to come up with a conclusion.
It looks like a linear process, right? Where’s the scope for iterations then? Well, iterations depend on whether the conclusion accepts or rejects our hypothesis.
If that conclusion accepts our hypothesis, then we forward the design to the engineering team. And if the conclusion rejects the hypothesis, we iterate. In that case, we go back to planning and start by asking questions again.
