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My Ongoing Journey as a Design Manager
I am currently Director of UX Design and lead a team of designers at Roposo. The team consists of super talented and passionate Senior and Junior Product designers, UX researchers, Motion Graphic designers and Graphic designers. Here is a glimpse of some of the milestones and achievements we have achieved as a team and also some of my personal on-going learnings.
The importance of a Design Process
As soon as I took over the team, I realised that while the designer were all individually capable and competent, there was a need for a design process that needed to be set up.
The next step was to define the design process and get buy in from different stakeholders ( PMs and EMs). This is the process which we follow as a team for each of the features we will ship, so roles, timelines can be set and communicated within the team and to PMs and EMs.
The process starts with a kick off meeting where all stakeholders meet and discuss and understand the scope of the project from the PMs. This is followed by the research phase and ideation, ideally user testing should start as early as possible so the design process is robust and everyone is on the same page.
Important Note: This process is to be followed only for larger features and each of these steps can be discussed and discarded or picked depending on the requirement ( to be discussed in the kick off meeting). For eg. a small bug fix will go directly from Screen to Zeplin
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Mentoring the Team
"Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by the ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that is stupid". - Albert Einstien
As part of the team mentoring, I also ensured that I invested time getting to know each team member, to not just judge by their current work but by their aspirations. While the roles are often defined, designers often exhibit skills that can be used across projects. So the first step was to understand each team member in depth. Here is a representational image of how i try to understand team members. Apart from core design skills, this also tries to understand individual designers working style, their aspiration so they can be assisted in not just completing their work but are also poised for personal growth.
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Roposo Clout - Building a Dropshipping platform
What is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a retail fulfilment method where a store doesn't keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when the store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party (usually a wholesaler or manufacturer) and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never handles or sees the product.
The advantage of drop shipping is it allows anyone to start a business with just investing in a website.
User Personas of Dropshipping
Dropshipping has 2 main sets of users in additon to Droppshipping influencers who are small group but are power users. Small ambitious sellers who only have a presence online and well established offline sellers who are looking to build their presence online. The later category understand the threads of the business but often times keep their offline and online categories different.
Roposos Clout has 2 basic workflows.I lead the design to create 2 parts of the dropshipping product eco-system.
Some Challenges and Opportunities
There were multiple design opportunities that were identified to make the life of the user easier and to accomplish their goals
Helping drop shippers pick the correct product for them to grow their business
Context
Drop shippers often times sell only a handful of products and not everything shown on their website. These products are "hero products" that vary depending on the demographics, taste, style and requirements of the user base the dropshipper caters too. Success in drop shipping is often attributed to picking the right mix of hero products and exposing them to the right set of users.
Challenge
Helping drop shippers decide what they should pick from the plethora of product options available gets tricky as there are multiple reasons why a product works better than the other product in the market. The trends are often not clear until too many drop shippers are trying to sell the same product
Process
Modify the home page to allow sellers to glance all product related information upfront so they can make the right decisions on what they can add to their Shopify website.
Multiple test and feedbacks tried to analyse the importance of Headers (Categories, ), Social proofing (enabling drop shipper to understand how other dropshippers have fared with a particular product), video v/s static content or a combination of the two.
Impact
Orders went up by 20% once we introduced the all the differnet aspects that helped dropshippers pick better
Role
UX Design Manager (Created rough sketches, reviewed and guided junior product designer and graphic designer)
Identifying opportunities for being a Value Add as a Platform
Important for us as a platform to also gauge what are the possible hero products that we can identify and suggest trends
Helping Drop shippers get the correct Price for the products they want to list
Context
Drop shippers work on varying margins and have various visible and invisible costs going into a product. For them bottom line decides wether the product is worth selling or not
Challenge
There are a lot of inputs to calculate the profit that a product will generate but not all of them are known to the system. Hence some were assumed and some were available and that had to be communicated without overwhelming the users. The other softer challenge from design pov was there were multiple stake holders with a different opinion on the subject and the design had to solve for all.
Process
The main users of profit calculator would be new users. So it was crucial to to make it easy to understand but build layers if some one would want to understand deeper.
To start with a basic a layout and then figure how to group information and highlight the right information to ensure that the dropshipper makes the right choice
Impact
Increased confidence among the drops
Role
UX Design Manager (Created rough sketches, reviewed and guided junior product designer)
Helping drop shippers serve their customers better using WhatsApp
Context
Any transaction is only valuable if the end customer receives the product and completes the payment loop. Hence last mile communication is crucial to a drop shipper
Challenge
A paid feature so the design needs to communicate what are the benfits very clearly without making it look like an ad or an upsell. This was a legitimate feature we knew would really benefit our users!
Process
The page itself was a single page to build awareness
Impact
Power Drop shippers loved it and it and in order to convicne more folks to join, business team agreed to start a free trial for some users.
Role
UX Design Manager (Created rough sketches, reviewed and guided external designer)
Origin of the idea
The importance of this feature came from user feedback from our previous product where the context was a bit different but the need was exactly the same! As designers it was important to be able to identify patterns and predict how useful this would be to drop shippers
Identifying and maintaining Information heirarchy when there is a lot of data to be shown
Context
On Clout there are multiple actions to be taken based on the previous action and these require a good understanding of what actual happens on the users end and simplifying from that point
Challenge
This can be overwhelming and often time feels unnecessary, hence it is important to understand the flow. Designers struggle between the need to keep the interface clean and
Process
Understanding user flows followed by mini- card sorting or discussions followed by validation
Role
UX Design Manager (Created rough sketches, reviewed and guiding designers)
Building and maintaining a Design system that looks and behaves consistently
Challenges
Why is building a design system was more challenging on Clout than on the Roposo Shoptab
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The focus is often on solving a user pain point or on creating a smooth functionality rather than hyper focussing on consistency. Hence this rarely gets prioritized.
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The users are more often than not using it to get tasks done and dont bring it up in the feedback, hence it doesn't get prioritized
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Shipping timelines are very tight and hence picking changes becomes difficult
Process
Its important to rally around small changes but work on it consistently. So we started changing one screen at a time in line with the product roadmap. So no screens were pciked only to fix UI but all screens that were picked were introduced with the new UI. As roadmaps inherently are built keeping in mind usage and coverage, crucial screens tarted getting more consistent and we received positive feedback for the same
Principles
- Clarity and Simplicity
- Reusability and scalability
- Consistency (to be maintained as much as possible)
