We spoke with Nick about the process of identifying users needs.
Now,we'll speak with a product designer about his role in the design process.
You might recognize him.
He's our instructor, Jeff Hilnbrand.
The design of any given product or feature
has lots of different parts of the design process all playing together.
A feature might start by identifying
an emerging behavior by users in an existing product.
We might also see something that we think will really
help users and drive that from a impact perspective.
From there usually the designer starts,
or a researcher starts exploring what ideas we have for how this feature might manifest.
So, we look at all different types of alternative possibilities for a design.
Say you're building a media product like there's
lots of different ways to present a certain picture,
could be in a full screen image,
it could be as part of a slideshow,
or an image grid just as an example.
So, we look at all different ways that we can put this design out there.
And we work in partnership with research,
which is looking to validate
any certain idea or learn more from users about what our opportunities are.
By talking with them in person,
or bringing these these different explorations we have to the users.
Yeah. Once we have signal on a design that we like,
we might pick one to three ideas to test out.
So, the designer will work with the researcher,
and the product manager,
and some other team members to develop a prototype
which we can then bring to users to help validate these ideas.
We start out by talking with user researchers about
what the goal of our research might be whether it's cognition,
or product market fit,
or just overall product understanding and usability.
And based on that we're building flows in certain pieces of
software that make interactive prototypes
that people can hold in their hand and actually play with.
And this allows us to watch their reactions to certain features,
we get to ask them questions about their understanding of it,
and ultimately these observations lead to insights which influence future designs.
The next step after watching someone use a prototype,
is taking those findings and converting them into insights or design changes.
We go back to the drawing board,
we discuss with a researcher what needs to be altered to
accommodate the different ways someone might use this app, or this product.
We might do a few more rounds of iterations on
this prototype to learn more about each correction we're making.
And ultimately when we're confident in
something we're moving into a higher fidelity stage.
We try to involve engineers in every step of the process,
so they're behind every decision we make.
Ultimately though once we've made a high fidelity design,
we do spec it for actual production.
So this means explaining how every interaction works,
getting dimensions on the different UI features.
There's also a long tail that follows,
which means the designer and also researchers are
involved in several stages after making a final design,
which could be exploring assets,
preparing even more rounds of iterations if we're doing more research.
Or revising designs for new edge cases we didn't anticipate.
Which might only arise once we start coding it up.
Sometimes we identify edge cases through the engineering process,
which means someone has identified a step that's actually missing,
there's no way to get from this part to another part of the flow perhaps.
And at that point we go back and we revise the flow.
We also find tons of edge cases in user testing earlier in the process.
Which is where someone might ask a question that we'd never anticipated,
which illuminates their unique position in this product.
Again this validates the need for user testing,
because we would never anticipate those specific needs.
My team at Facebook is the consumer payments team,
which means alongside ads payments,
we work on things that are more focused at the end user of Facebook.
And so one of the features that we put out recently is called group requests.
It's part of a feature where inside of
our messaging app you can send and request money to each other.
And we identified that people were sending a lot of these inside of group threads,
so threads with multiple people,
and all of them were for the same amount.
And we figured that this would be a cool opportunity to make a feature
that accommodates that behavior and allows them to do it faster,
and in a more consolidated, efficient way.
So, we identified that emerging behavior and we built a feature,
launched it several months ago that addresses this need.
And along the way not only did we stumble on
this feature because of watching users and engaging with users,
but we validated it after having initial explorations with users around the area.
So, we not only came up with the idea because of user-centered design,
but we really reinforced the idea that it was valuable through that process.