UI & UX design agency

Random thoughts of GRIN tech’s design team

I like this definition: “Packaged value.” A value in the form of something small and tangible. Generally, that’s what product designers work on. They help us understand what we do, why, how it will work and what people should feel when they use it.

Designers have an advanced application. They need the product to be both functional and successful. So apart from a gut feeling, as a product designer one needs to know about business, people, the psychology of perception and things like that.

An artist has no restrictions at all. Artists are only limited by real-life capabilities of the physical world or digital environment (if they are digital artists). However, a designer is not an artist and is limited by many requirements. It is necessary for a product to be appealing to customers, usable, profitable and financially possible to produce.

There should always be a conflict between “design” and “product.” I think you cannot expect anything outstanding or interesting if a product designer deals with both parts of his profession on the same wavelength. A little pressure and tension between the two aspects open doors to some exciting solutions.

A designer can say: “It seems to me that it’s a mess. How can anybody understand what is that?”. And this seems to be a subjective thing, but it can be measured: take four people, show them a picture, ask them questions and it will immediately become clear whether people understand it or not.

A designer should have a strong opinion that is weak.

A designer must have an opinion, defend it convincingly and have solid arguments; otherwise, such a designer is not more than a flag in the wind. But their opinion should be flexible and open-minded.

Designers should be able to listen to and hear counterarguments, understand them. Designers should be open enough to change their point of view if there is a better solution and then — just as vehemently and vigorously — defend that new one.

I think this is a matter of balance: a solid opinion opened to weighed-in transformations.

Airbnb very well managed to maintain a balance between what is measurable and what is purely aesthetic. Amazon and Booking, on the other hand, leaned heavily on measurability; thus everything there looks the way it looks.

In Booking, everything screams it has been optimized to squeeze every tiny bit of profit out of you every single moment.

I still use it, though.

I use Amazon too – a super successful product and one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It would be naive to criticize their design, but I think they could look better: be more human, take care of people and at the same time be a successful business. I guess even Google handles that much better now.

At the interview, I can ask a designer a direct question: “The project from your portfolio, it was a year ago. So what would you do differently if you were asked to do this project today?”

And it is immediately revealed if that person made conclusions and learned something on the job, or got lost and is inevitably frustrated by the question.

Even experienced designers often lose the sense of what they do, because they sometimes are just carried away by their work. I guess it’s only a part of human nature.

Why this font? Why this color? Why rounded corners? Why an indentation like this? A good designer should have clear answers. Nothing should be accidental. A designer must have an explanation of why something is the way it is.

One of the first things designers encounter at the beginning of their way is excessive dogmatism. When a person has a set of rules in his head, he or she begins to follow them rigidly, not ready to take a single step back. It’s a trap.

All designers want to redo everything other designers did. How to beat this unhealthy passion?

Measure everything. We can measure every change using metrics, roll the product out only if the metrics grow, and optimize only local parts. I think that a method of a “concept car” is the right way for this: there is some vision of what a perfect bright future might look like for a product.

A team may even let a small part of the audience in to test it or leave the test version to themselves and not show it to anyone.

And then a team might take small steps in the direction of this concept vision, allowing themselves even to squander sometimes. “Okay, we’ll lose a bit here, but we have a bright future ahead. It unlocks a lot of doors for us, so we’ll keep going there.” Some balance.

Feature prioritization is an art form. I do not like it when people are rigid and try to develop an algorithm to it. I think that our sense of value, what people ask of us, our strategy and what competitors do — all should boil together by itself producing its unified meaning.

It seems to me that people who say they never look at competitors are either hypocritical or lie to themselves to a certain degree.

We have a particular position — a content designer. That is a person who specializes in words: comes up with the right titles and writes plain good texts. That is a word design.

A good content designer thinks like a designer. One should see the entire product as a whole, clearly understand its place in the context of the whole complex system. A content designer understands how to call things, how to refer to them and how to make it all clear and understandable to people through the means of text.

One of the principles, which seems very important to me is: it must be possible for people at any moment to tell if they communicate with a bot or a person.