First-hand experience in designing a design team
Designing a design team? Why not? Here’s what we did, what we learned and would have done better.
This article is written by me and Nathaniel Biancaputra
6 months ago we took a drastic decision to leave our existing job and take a chance at the opportunity in front of us at goKampus, an education marketplace platform startup established in 2018 and homegrown in Jakarta, Indonesia.
What motivated us to take this opportunity?
Although most of the articles did not recommend a couple to work together, we both have our reasons, we know what each of us wants to pursue. We know this both would be beneficial for our long-term career growth.
For Nathan who previously worked in one of the unicorn startups, it is the opportunity to build a team from scratch in an ed-tech industry. A chance to establish, nurture a design culture, and envision how the design team would come to live.
For Steffie who previously worked in a design agency, it is the opportunity to witness how would a design decision impact the experiences for each user, a chance to collaborate in the longer term with a dedicated team that builds, develop, and iterates products.
So the story begins
So this is the journey we take after joining the company. Hopefully what we share here may portray a glimpse of what we are trying to build. We summarize it into 5 important steps that we took in building the foundation of a functioning UX team that literally starts from nothing.
1. Establishing a design system and revamping the visuals
For almost 3 years, goKampus doesn’t have a dedicated product team or designer. As the first members we have no SOPs or any rules, and thus our collaboration came down from our VP of product. The existing design was created from ad hoc design requests to a freelance designer. Scalability, consistency, and maintenance were not a priority back then.
Designing design system
This is a golden opportunity to establish a design system. Having worked in a pretty chaotic environment without a proper design system, We realised the importance of establishing a clear design system and guidance. As a designer who have experienced it firsthand, Steffie was longing to take up this challenge.
Starting design system from scratch can be a daunting task, although design system is really useful to keep things organized and easily adaptable, we don’t want it to slow designers down when creating interfaces, or worse, blocking designers to be creative while solving a problem.
On the other side, having a design system is better than no design system at all. Design system is a tool, not a product, it will never be a finished product. We decided to start with the “Minimum-Viable Design System” with primary foundations such as colors, typefaces, and few components like buttons and textfields.
As we progress, some objects are used more frequently than others, prompting us to add it to the design system to save us more time designing interfaces. It takes collaboration and participation to make a design system works and grow. We are still seeking feedback constantly and observing how designers uses it in order to have a designer-friendly design system.
Applying new typeface and visual style
One of the KPI is to keep the design up to date with the latest visual trend, so we decided to change the font on our whole interface with Circular font. The reason (other than it looks undeniably cool and nice) is Circular has been used by several popular brands, which provide us references for the way we utilized typefaces on the interface.
What we could have done better for design system and visual revamp
- Be more confident about our decision, anything we create will always need improvement.
- Build what we need first, focusing on components that we often use.
- It is easier to improve or remove a component, rather than modifying a bunch of non-component elements that has been copied and used on dozens of screens and files.
- Keep a back up files before doing a major change in your design system (such as switching fonts)
2. Recruiting our first members
As soon as both of us are working, we find ourselves needing more hands on the deck. With two platforms that we needed to take care; mobile and website, we decided to invite 2 additional members onboard.
Hiring was not an easy task and never simple, it should even be treated like dating. luckily 2 awesome members joined us as part our small team. Denny with his extensive knowledge and eloquent skill with people, and Zaki with his neat visual and attention to details. Both with their own character and strength that shapes our dynamic team.
While working virtually at home can be very comfortable, nothing beats the excitement of meeting your team members face to face. Last year we had the opportunity to catch up with the whole team and do some UX research project in Bali. It enables us to know each other better, and strengthen our bond onwards.
We held a weekly call in which we reconnect, share our activities and progress. We often watch documentaries, TED talks, or videos about design practices to evoke ideas and generate discussions.
What we could have done better for recruitments
- We scheduled an interview before giving out a design challenge and some candidates didn’t submit the challenge, turning the time we spent into waste. We figured we should have given out the challenge prior to scheduling the interview to avoid being “ghosted”.
- It was intricate to conduct our recruitment process in the midst of our sprint process and research. We should have estimated and allocated more time for hiring. We admitted it was a rush we appealed a good one. However, it may not be the same for our next hiring.
3. Equipping ourselves from the best practices
Taking up new position means getting additional responsibilities. We realised this upcoming responsibilities will be needing more than our experiences, we will be needing support both in knowledge and mindset from the experts. After receiving the offer, we seek enlightenment through various UX books, articles and guidances.
So here are some book list that has been helpful for us to tackle the expected challenges when we took up the role;
- The User Experience Team of One — Leah Buley
- Lean UX; Designing Great Products with Agile Team — Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
- Expressive Design System — Yesenia Perez Cruz
- Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug
- Blitzscaling — Reid Hoffman
- Product Led Growth — Wes Bush
- The Making of a Manager — Julie Zhuo
- Design Systems — Alla Kholmatova
- Hacking Growth — Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis
Although not all the knowledge is directly applicable, it indeed enriches our mind and perspective which has proven to be useful when facing all the challenges.
What we could have done better
- Not all the knowledge are 100% relevant with our context. Books are meant to shape our mindset and broaden our perspective, not a cookie cutter that would guarantee your success.
- It relies on our own creative intuition to contextualize the knowledge with our condition. For example, many books advices us to be data grounded by having close collaboration with the data analyst. That time, we did not have our own analyst, we end up forcing ourselves to learn the basic and interpret it in an amateur-ish way (thankfully our company hired one).
4. Realizing the importance of research
Having the expertise and experience in UX research beforehand, Nathan is determined to make research a culture, not just something nice to have. Right after we took up the positions, we were requested to revamp our students’ admission flow. We observed the brief and noticed the 2 weeks of given deadline from design to development. We recommended extending the timeline for a few days and allocate the first days for research. Our product manager agreed with what we proposed and participated in our usability testing session as well.
Running research is not always a simple task. It’s time consuming and complicated. However, it is important to ensure we do have a profound direction when doing the revamp. We try to get ourselves obsessed in finding the right problem before suggesting any solutions. Everyone knew that our current flow was very much lacking in visual attraction, but furthermore seeking how the flow functions is way more crucial. And that was the first thing we dug in our usability testing session.
We invited the PMs, designers, and our CEO to observe the session directly, we gave them a chance to ask as well. The session managed to open their minds about what the users are seeking and inspired them to create a more user-centric plan. We are not only getting the right direction for product revamp but also striving to spark stakeholders’ empathy by listening directly to the users.
What we could have done better
- Better research planning and prioritization. Since we do not have a dedicated researcher, it’s easy for us to prioritize our design work over the research, and thus it delays the progress.
- Collect and compose earlier data from other members/teams. Sometimes earlier pieces of data can be gathered from other departments. However, we did not ask around much and only rely on our plan.
5. Evangelizing our practice and works
One of the important missions that we envisioned is to become a team that advocates for users’ needs. We realized this kind of initiative couldn’t come from our CEO or PMs or other board of members. We initiated conducting another research that focuses on understanding the students’ thoughts and behavior. The objective was simple, presenting the company with a comprehensive research of our users’ thoughts and motivations before deciding which University to enroll in. Hoping to enlighten the board to make a better-informed policy by having the users’ thoughts in place.
2-months research was conducted, interviewing 12-grade students from various places around the greater Jakarta area and outside Java island. It was exhaustive and tiring, not to mention the unprecedented hurdles we faced when scouting for the respondents. It took us almost 2 weeks to analyze, synthesize the data, and have brainstorming sessions. But the whole process created a stronger bond among our team and we learned a lot from each other.
In the end, we managed to conclude the research report and presented it to the whole company during the town hall meeting. We explained how Indonesian high school students perceived university life, what their obstacles and frustrations are when looking for their desired college, whom they get influenced by when making the decisions, and many more. We closed our presentation with a list of actionable insights the company can do to make our product the answer to the students’ problems.
What we could have done better
- Not everyone will pay attention to your work. People will always have something more urgent to be taken care of and it is totally fine.
- Create more visually appealing presentation (yes we put too much text into our slide).
Still a long way to go
Every big tree starts from a tiny seed, including our team. There’s still a massive path of learning we should partake in for our team to grow bigger. We are still a team of four who pretty much is doing everything at hand.
But just as other design teams grow, the more members join, the more specific responsibilities will also take place. So before that time is coming we have to prepare our team with a more robust collaboration system that enables everyone to thrive and understand their strength and passion.
During the past 6 months, we had mistakes that we did not predict. Some of our past decision was ineffective or didn’t have enough understanding in creating a well-functioning product team. It’s indeed still a long process for us. And we never know what other problems might unfold. But with the right mindset, we hope we can strive to learn, iterate, and survive.
Hopefully one day our team can grow bigger, advocate more strongly for our users, provide pleasant experiences for them and create such a significant impact that everyone in the whole company would hardly ignore.
