John Flynn's guide to product design
•
1 gostou•594 visualizações
John Flynn is a product designer based in New York City. He received a diploma in 2004 and currently works at Dogvacay, where he helps design digital products through various stages including research, planning, requirements gathering, design iterations, building prototypes, user testing, and repeating the process. He welcomes inquiries about product design and his work can be reached at design@dogvacay.com.
Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Destaque
Destaque (19)
Último
Último (20)
John Flynn's guide to product design
- 3. 2004
- 4. DIPLOMA
- 7. WHAT DO YOU DO AT DOGVACAY ANYWAY?
- 9. OK. WHAT THE HELL IS PRODUCT DESIGN?
- 10. +10
- 11. DESIGN
- 13. DESIGN GRAPHIC
- 14. DESIGN VISUAL
- 16. DESIGN INTERFACE
- 17. DESIGN MOTION
- 23. DASHBOARD
- 25. RESEARCH
- 26. PLANNING
- 27. REQUIREMENTS
- 28. DESIGN
- 29. DESIGN
- 30. DESIGN
- 31. DESIGN
- 32. DESIGN
- 33. BUILD IT
- 34. OBSERVE
- 35. DO IT AGAIN
Notas do Editor
- So, I think I know most of you, but for everyone I haven’t met or don’t know real well, my name is John Flynn, I’ve been with DogVacay since the end of last summer, so about 10 months.
- My background: I’m from the Northeast, so New York, Boston, New Hampshire. I’ve been living and working in Los Angeles since 2004…
- …which is the year that “Yeah” by Usher, Lil Jon, and Ludacris was the top song in America, so, a lot of good memories there.
- I have a diploma from the School of Hard Knocks, which is to say, I don’t have a design degree. I don’t say this to minimize the amount of work or money involved in getting a degree today, but tech jobs—and design maybe most of all—is 100% about your body of work and what’s in your portfolio.
- So, my first gig here in Los Angeles was at a company called Neopets—some of you may be familiar—this was a really early social game/virtual worlds site where you played games, took care of a virtual pet… we had plushies in McDonalds, a magazine, there was a PS2 game (where is my PS2 crew)
- And I’ve worked at a few other companies, freelanced for a lot more, I’ve been an illustrator, art director, creative director, front-end developer… and now I’m at DogVacay.
- So, that’s my background, and so the first question I actually came to answer is “What do you do at DogVacay”?
- and the answer is: Product Design. And this understandably leads right into the next question, which is…
- Ok, that’s a great question.
- …because like a lot of things about the tech industry, it’s kind of a meaningless made-up title!
- So, to try to explain what product design is, I’ll step back a little bit and quickly talk about all the kinds of design. And obviously there’s industrial design, fashion design, architecture…
- …but here we’re just talking about all the types of design that are involved in building software.
- First, there’s graphic design. You’re probably all familiar with this term, and it’s pretty broad. You’re using graphics to communicate things. Typography, illustration, layout… graphic design.
- Visual design is like graphic design, but it’s more about branding and telling a cohesive story. Aesthetics, making things beautiful.
- Interaction design is also a really broad discipline. Interaction designers are making things for users, figuring out how something will be used. Psychology, user research, designing systems.
- Interface design is a little more specific. This is a focus on how the interface will look and act and feel when someone uses it to perform a task. How do I get this done? How can we make someone feel good about using the product?
- Now, to get even more specific, we have more fields like… motion design. This is a way more specific field of graphic design that focuses on animation, kinetics, timing.
- And there’s even more stuff that doesn’t have a “DESIGN” at the end of it that you need to do to build a product. Product management—which we have a dedicated team working on, but just like design, everyone plays a role in this. I’ll talk a little more about that later
- And going even higher up, business strategy. Why are we doing this? What’s the job we’re trying to do for the customers? How can we best measure those goals?
- So… digital product design is essentially a little bit of all of those different disciplines.
- And this is an incredibly vague answer, but basically: it’s whatever needs to get done to build a DIGITAL PRODUCT. Like an Android app. Like a business that sells you shoes online. Like a DogVacay.
- Now, I’ll talk briefly about one of our recent projects that everyone here will have a lot of interaction with…
- …which is the portal project. And specifically, the new host dashboard that’s going out real soon. So, you’ve seen this before, this is a mockup of what the final version of the dashboard will look like for an active host, more or less.
- But how did we get to that point? So let’s rewind back to, say, February, when we picked up this project (or at least when I started working on it), and I’m going to way over-simplify all of this just to give an overview of the process, but…
- So this is a long term project and there’s a lot of back story to stuff that we know we want… and hosts want… and other stuff. There’s a lot of research here too in terms of: talking to hosts, surveying users, seeing what our competition is doing, etc.
- So, we take that research and start to plan out what we’re going to do with it. There are UX techniques involved here like card sorting, mental modeling, user journey maps… but basically we’re trying to take all that feedback from the previous step and turn it into a new dashboard that will solve problems for Hosts.
- Now that planning gets turned into requirements, and this is where we make very specific decisions about content, and what numbers we need to hit, and what outcomes will mean success or failure for different parts of this thing we’re going to create.
- And somewhere in here, we’re starting on design. So there’s wireframes, where we’re just putting things together in a really simple way to see how all the information works together…
- And we’re designing the look and feel and layout of the thing, of how the information will be organized and where people will use it…
- And we’re designing buttons and icons and the visual bits that help communicate the whole thing to our users…
- And we’re building prototypes that we can test ourselves and test with users to see how our different solutions work before we commit to building them…
- And we’re putting it all together in a ton of different ways for new users, and Hosts that are waiting for approval, and new Hosts, and power Hosts…
- And then we build it. So engineering is taking all of the design stuff that we did, and assembling it, and basically throwing away most of the design stuff that we did because none of it matters. None of that design stuff matters, what matters is the stuff that we actually build and get out to users.
- And now we watch. So we’re going to roll this thing out to our Hosts and see how they use it, what they find useful, what they find confusing. We’ll talk to them and we’ll measure the things they click on and how many times they use a particular feature, and these things become our research, just like back in step one.
- And then we do all of it again, that whole process. And maybe there’s a little less design involved at this stage and a little more building, or a lot more planning, or more observation, but basically building a tech product like this means that we do this whole process again and again in (hopefully) better ways until we’re incredibly successful or until the sun burns out and everybody dies. So basically forever.
- And this is a really expensive and complicated process, but I think the most important thing to remember here is that it’s just building a digital product.
- And our digital product is cool, but it’s just one kind of minor piece in the entire messy, very human experience that people have when they use DogVacay. And that’s where you come in, and that’s also really humbling for us as product people because there’s a lot about it that we can’t control inside of a website or an app.
- So the big takeaway here is that making products takes a ton of people, and frequently the best ideas don’t come from someone with the word “designer” in their title. So it sounds really cheesy, but my primary job here at DogVacay is to help ideas—wherever they come from—and figure out what the best way to turn that into a working product is.
- So, that’s it. And on that note, I’ll say that any ideas, any suggestions, whatever you guys have or want to share, you can always email Design@DogVacay and that will go to me and my team and we’ll chat. Thanks!