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PRODUCT REVIEW -Nor Shahirah binti Sutainim (2021240188) -DTC755

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FINAL INFOGRAPHIC_Noor Siti Fitrah Binti Azman 2022363379

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FINAL INFOGRAPHIC_Noor Siti Fitrah Binti Azman 2022363379

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DTC755-FINAL ASSIGNMENT-NUR AMALINA BINTI MOHD ZAKI 2022522353

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DTC 755 Product Review_Noor Siti Fitrah binti Azman 2022363379

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DTC755-Existing Product Analysis On The Official Vests -NUR AMALINA BINTI MOHD ZAKI 2022522353

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FINAL INFOGRAPHIC (PRODUCT DESIGN RESEARCH)

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FINAL ASSIGNMENT

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Assalamualaikum Dr. Rainal, the previous ‘Product Review’ I used “pros & Cons”. And I decided to do a correction on this. Thank You Dr.

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2022349491 ZHANG YINGKUN

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https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html

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This free sample size calculator determines the sample size required to meet a given set of constraints. Also, learn more about population standard deviation.

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SDG

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https://uxplanet.org/what-is-product-design-and-the-product-design-process-41b41a5bf795

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A designer's blueprint for success

In the last few months of joining Canva as a Product Designer, I've received many questions around what it means to be in Product Design.

What is Product Design?

What is the Product Design process?

What skills do I need to be a Product Designer?

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a Product Design workshop on behalf of UNSW's Digital Society. The workshop seemed like the perfect chance to teach university students and career changers about what it means to be a Product designer at Canva.

For the full presentation and recording, you can scroll down to the bottom of this article or view the video here.

Defining Product Design

As Nick Babich explains in an article that he wrote on Smashing Magazine:

Product design is the process of identifying a market opportunity, clearly defining the problem, developing a proper solution for that problem and validating the solution with real users.

Product design is built on a popular framework called Design Thinking which is a human centred approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, technological possibilities and business requirements.

It's important to note that whilst this blog will reference to digital goods, product design transcends this and can cover anything from digital goods to physical products and even environmental experiences.

The Product Design Process

The Product Design process is a critical framework that designers use to solve problems. As we walk through each section of this article, you'll notice that the concepts and skills required of a product designer is varied and will change depending on which stage of the process you're at.

As a product designer, you get to wear multiple hats which means your day-to-day will never look the same. You'll be part problem solver, part researcher, part designer, part product manager, part data analyst and part marketer.

Before we delve into the design process, it's always important to ask yourself WHY you and your team are building the product. Having a vision or a north star gives you purpose and helps to define what you are trying to build. Too often do teams jump into development without having a clearly defined goal. This can lead to disastrous results if the end product does not meet the needs of users or stakeholder expectations.

Evaluate product-market fit before building a product

It's crucial to assess whether there is a strong demand or need for your product before beginning the design and development process. We often validate this product-market fit by conducting what we call user research.

User research

Some methods for user research include:

User interviews. Avery common qualitative research technique that can be conducted in-person or remotely. Whilst organising and analysing findings from interviews can be time consuming, the benefit of this method is that you can uncover insights from direct conversation with users than from surveys alone.

Online surveys. Surveys and questionnaires enable you to obtain a large volume of quantitative data in a short amount of time. Whilst they can be relatively quick and inexpensive to run, the downside to this is that you may lack deeper insights that you would normally get from in-person interactions.

Contextual inquiry. A method in which you observe people go about their day-to-day tasks in their natural environment. This allows you to truly empathise with your users as it forces you to put yourself in their shoes.

Market research: Understanding how your competitors approach similar problems is a crucial component of the product design process as it allows you to learn from their design patterns and mistakes.

User analysis

Once we've collected the data from user research, we often synthesise our findings by grouping them into common themes - an exercise which we call Affinity mapping. Affinity mapping allows us to form insights from raw data which we can then use to inform our decision making.

For the purposes of the workshop, I wanted to focus on a relevant topic that was having a profound impact on people today. Knowing that the recent global pandemic had forced many people to work from home, I was curious to explore what impact this was having on people working remotely today.

Affinity mapping exercise used to group common issues

Common themes identified from the research were:

Unhealthy habits. Due to the blending of work and home environments, there was a tendency for people to work longer hours than usual. Sitting down for too long and not moving around as much meant that remote workers were experiencing physical health issues such as back pain as their lifestyle became more sedentary.

Isolation. The lack of coffee chats, social gatherings and hallway chats usually found in office environments meant that many people living alone were experiencing isolation from loss of in-person connections. Prolonged quarantine and lock-downs have contributed to a rise in mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Distractions. External environmental factors such as children and pets, as well as technological disruptions from poor internet and electricity blackouts, have led to a loss in focus times and productivity. This meant that remote workers would often work overtime to compensate for the loss in productivity, leading to a vicious cycle of unhealthy habits.

When it comes to user research, we also need to understand who we're building for, so creating user personas is important part of this process. The purpose of persona mapping helps to formulate reliable and realistic representations of the key audience segments when it comes to empathising with our users.

Example of a user persona (Image credit: Adobe)

Now that we have a better understanding of the problems, we can start to focus on the core user issues and turn them into opportunities by using what we call the problem statement definition. This step is important as it allows you to understand the goal of your design project and provide a clear objective to work towards.

We often start with the phrase 'How Might We' to create our problem statement. For example:

How might we encourage people working from home to adopt better health and wellness habits?

Once you've defined your problem statement, we move into the ideation phase. Ideation is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas and solutions that address the problem statement. This is an extremely valuable step as it allows you to build trust by getting stakeholders together in a room to align on the future vision.

Competitor research

Often we refer to competitors in the market as a way to learn and take inspiration from. When conducting competitive analysis, we often look for design patterns - in their product offering, the user experience and the visual design. I've listed two examples of products that are tackling a similar problem in the health and wellness space below.

Headspace is an example of a mental health and meditation app that allows users to sign up and engage in meditation courses.

Zen mode is also an app that locks you out of your phone so that you're forced to take a break away from the screen.

In both examples, you can see that the user journey is very similar. A user would:

1. Sign up or log into the app

2. Define their goals

3. Receive a task to complete

4. Perform the task and;

5. Track their progress over time

User Journey mapping

User Journey mapping is a process that a user must go through in order to accomplish a goal. A user journey is presented as a series of steps and actions in a timeline skeleton. Such a layout makes it easier for all team members to understand and follow the user's narrative.

Sketching the solution

Sketching is a valuable activity as it allows stakeholders (PMs, engineers and customers) to get into a room and align on the vision. This drawing exercise encourages non-designers to put forth their ideas and is a great way to foster collaboration as some of the most creative ideas can come from people who don't have a design background.

When we're sketching, we often refer back to our problem statement and user journey map to help us frame the problem space and define the scope of the work.

Design principles

As mentioned at the start of this article, we often need a north star or vision to work towards. Having design principles to guide your solution is useful as it helps to establish what we want our product to become and what we don't want our product to become.

Some guiding principles for a mental health and wellness product could be:

Simple but not overwhelming

Human and empathetic, not robotic

Motivating and engaging, not a chore

Flexible and personalised, not forced

Encourages LESS screen time, not more

Here is an example of an idea that I sketched out:

Example sketch for a health and wellness app

Similar to Zen mode, I came up with an idea for an app that encourages you to take a break by providing you with personalised activities.

As a user, I would:

1. Sign up or log in

2. Define my goals (e.g. exercise more, connect with friends, explore new hobbies)

3. Receive activity ideas (e.g. go for a walk at a park nearby, call a friend, try out a painting class)

4. Receive credits upon task completion

5. Track my progress towards my goals

6. Exchange my credits for rewards

Once you've sketched out your solution, don't be afraid to share your ideas. Part of the design process is being able to share your work and receive feedback from others.

Once you're happy with your solution, you can use design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch and Invision or Adobe XD to create a clickable prototype.

Examples of prototyping tools

Personally I would recommend Figma as it is an all-in-one tool that has both design and prototyping functionalities. I would also recommend looking at the Figma Community which is a great repository for you to remix, reuse and repurpose existing templates that other users publish freely online- similar to Github but specifically for design.

For the purposes of the workshop I used an existing Figma template that already had a design system created. Figma has really great tutorials that you can watch to learn how to piece together screens using pre-made components.

Creating components

Components are very useful when it comes to speeding up your design workflow. The master component is created when you first turn a UI element into a component. It defines the properties of that component. The instance is a copy of the master component that you can reuse across designs. To learn how to create components in Figma, you can watch this tutorial.

Editing a master component applies the changes to the instances

Using a design system

A design system is a collection of elements that can be combined and reused to build products. Using a design system is a really effective way of speeding up your design workflow and it allows you to maintain consistency across your designs. You can find more examples of design systems built by other companies by visiting this list of design systems. For an in-depth tutorial on how to create a design system in Figma, watch this tutorial.

Prototyping

To create interactions and transition states between screens, connect them together using nodes (i.e. the blue dots). You can specify the animations by editing the settings in Prototype > Interaction and Animation. To learn more on how to prototype in Figma, watch this tutorial.

Previewing your prototype

If you've created a mobile prototype, you can use Figma Mirror to view and interact with the prototype on your mobile device. Simply go to the Play Store and download Figma Mirror. Select a frame on your Figma desktop app and watch it appear on your phone!

Usability testing is an important part of the design process as it allows us to get feedback from users during the ideation phase before anything gets built or shipped. This is crucial as it allows you to identify any usability issues upfront before you invest more time in developing the solution.

Depending on the stage of the design process, choose the method that minimises work and maximises learning. Don't be afraid to test low-fidelity prototypes.

Some examples of usability testing methods and tools include:

Moderated usability testing. With moderated usability testing, a real person will be there to help facilitate the test either in person or remotely. To learn how to conduct moderated usability tests, refer to these usability testing templates.

Unmoderated usability testing. Unmoderated forms of testing occurs when the participant is not monitored or guided. These can be conducted remotely via websites such as Usertesting.com or UsabilityHub where participants can be recruited via these platforms.

Guerrilla testing. Guerrilla testing is a process where test subjects are selected at random in public places and asked to perform a quick usability test. It's commonly used to test a wide cross-section of users with no previous connection to the product and collect a large amount of data to quickly validate designs.

Dog-fooding. Dog-fooding is a common way to test your product in-house before you release your product to the public. "Eating your own dog food" is a popular technique of testing as it allows your team to develop empathy and identify any critical issues.

When it comes to recruiting participants, according to Jakob Nielsen's research, observing 5 participants using your product is enough to identify up to 85% of core usability problems.

Once you've shipped your product, that's not it - it's only just the beginning! You need to track how well it's performing now that it's out in the wild and in the hands of your users. Some key metrics that you should monitor include adoption, activation, drop off, churn, and retention rates.

Some examples of tracking tools include Hotjar, Google Analytics and Mode Analytics. If data analytics is not your strength, get an engineer or a data analyst to help you out when setting up the tracking events.

You should get into a regular habit of performing A/B testing on design changes and iterations before you roll them out to all users as this gives you confidence in what performs better in terms of conversions and success metrics.

However, don't solely rely on analytics. You should also aim to get user feedback from email surveys, in-product questionnaires and even hallway tests. Analytics alone may not always provide you with the insights that you could get from just having a conversation with your users.

It's not a linear process

Whilst we went through a very structured and linear design process, the reality is that you may find yourself jumping back and forth to learn more about the problem space.

There's no one size fits all

The product design process should morph to fit the project, not the other way round. Your design process will depend on the stage of the product development lifecycle that the feature or product is at. In other words, if the product is in its early stage, you may want to spend more time doing user research; whereas if it has been shipped, your priorities might lie in growing and optimising your product.

It's a never ending process

Continual improvement is at the core of what we do, so keep refining and improving your product! Once a product has been shipped, never assume that it is finished. Continue to get feedback and refine your product as your users' needs may change over time.

Finally, the most important thing to remember when designing products is that we are ultimately designing a product for people to use. As product designers, we play an important role in shaping our future. The products we create have the power to transform how societies think, feel and behave as you may have seen in the recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. You can read more about why we need to be more conscious of how we design for the future in this article: 3 important things to consider when designing products today.

Thanks for reading! If you would like to share your design resources or have any questions, please comment below. Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin if you'd like to chat or just to say hi!
We're hiring at Canva! Come and join one of Australia's fastest growing startups where our mission is to empower the world to design. Take a look at the roles available here!

Product Design Workshop recording (Source: UNSW Digital Society)

A link to the presentation can be found here.

Product Design Presentation

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What is Product Design and the Product Design Process?

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In the last few months of joining Canva as a Product Designer, I've received many questions around what it means to be in Product Design. What is Product Design? What is the Product Design process? What skills do I need to be a Product Designer?

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You did not submit the infographic for the assignment 3B

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ASSIGNMENT 3B -Nor Shahirah binti Sutainim (2021240188)-combined (1)

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3A_DTC 750 NOOR SITI FITRAH AZMAN 2022363379

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3B_DTC 750 NOOR SITI FITRAH AZMAN 2022363379

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DTC755_ASSIGNMENT3B_ NUR AMALINA BINTI MOHD ZAKI 2022522353

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Assignment 3B Problem Statement Infographic

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Assignment 3B Problem Statement Format 1

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Assignment 3B Problem Statement Format 1