Experience Design & Strategy, Momentum & Collaboration

Small Clue…. It’s not about having the best hardware, drinking a super high octane coffee or knowing all the shortcuts of your favorite design tools (although this last one we definitely got going.). Our favorite tool happens to be Figma … read why.

Need it Yesterday

Designers often want time. Time to get inspired, think, explore, brainstorm, meditate,  scroll a couple articles on medium but only look at the pictures and read the titles… you get it, it’s all part of the creative process.

However, in the real world, more often than not you’ll find yourself in a situation where our clients need something delivered yesterday, and in such situations we just have to deliver.

Radical Truth:

We know when people in general have a relaxed deadline they usually waste most of the time looking for "inspiration", and they end up sprinting to deliver something anyway. Basically, whether there is tight deadline or not, being fast only helps.

We know people are motivated by solving problems. We prefer to spend our energy on solving “cases”. We create cases out of projects with data driven goals, we know it is the way to get truly great results.

Apollo 13: Understanding what problem we are solving.

When we work on collaborative projects, we find that having a tight deadline and a clear goal often helps the collaboration process.  The team focuses more on problem solving, not just endless and meaningless riffing.

We use design thinking in our process — throughout— it’s not separate.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach which assesses known aspects of a problem as well as ambiguous of peripheral factors that may contribute to the conditions to a problem. This contrasts with the Scientific Method where the concrete and known aspects are tested to arrive at a solution Had the astronauts tried this approach, they would most likely would have blacked out as they tested their gauges to see of they were indeed reading correct CO2 levels. We find that with the rate of change in competitors and markets that being dynamic and unattached is just absolutely necessary.

Melon team members employing Design Thinking ask significant questions and challenge assumptions.

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which knowledge is constantly being questioned and acquired so it can help us redefine a problem to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

[Several technicians dump boxes containing the same equipment and tools that the astronauts have with them onto a table]

Technician: We’ve got to find a way to make this [square CSM LiOH canister]

Technician: fit into the hole for this [round LEM canister]

Technician: … using nothing but that.

The world looked to the NASA engineers and flight controllers to come up with a miracle, and fast.

Remember this scene from the film Apollo 13? Image from the film Apollo 13, released in 1995, directed by Ron Howard

How We Do It

1. Get Clear On The Goal

Our energy is used in the beginning to get clear on we want to accomplish before we start, because then, when we actually start we have a clear target. Not defining a goal is the same as if you go practice shooting with your eyes closed. You might hit something but it's way easier to do so if you can see your target. This doesn’t take ages though -- it is just enough to be sure we know what a win looks like.

2. Quantity Leads to Quality

We don’t wait for the best idea to fall from the sky,  WE JUST GET STARTED.

As you might already know, designing is an iterative process, you try again and again until you get to the best solution. If we’re fast, you can try more things, understand what doesn’t work, improve it and potentially we’ll get to an even better solution. If we are collaborative, we can have even more ideas and perspectives.

We can also go the extra mile and deliver more than what is expected, we get up in the morning to blow away our clients. Moreover, when we do more we don't just improve our chances of coming up with something great, we also improve ourselves, because practice does make perfect.

3. Humility. We Don’t Get Emotionally Attached To “Our” Idea or Design.

 We use Figma in working sessions as a digital whiteboard to “sketch.” We always like to start with sketching. It’s one of the most efficient ways to put abstract ideas into something tangible and see if they can work. It costs you very little time you're not invested or attached to these ideas yet, which makes it easier to throw them away if you need to.

It might sound counter productive, because if you want to be fast, "doodling" might sound like a step in between you and the final thing, but it's not, because you just don't know what the final thing is yet. You're experimenting, so you better do it in a way that is fast and inexpensive.

4. We Are Real Designers. Collaborating in Real Time = Being Exposed

We like to share our progress and process with clients. We expose how we think and listen to our clients, which enables us to think critically and edit quickly.

We are firm believers that is best to share your work sooner rather than later. We get other perspectives and you might just get the feedback that you need to take your idea to the next level. We might also realize that our idea doesn’t work, or get insight into something new that mean we have to start over. If that’s the case, we’d rather do it early in the process, when both our investment and our clients’ investment was minimal, and we’re all less attached to the work.

Another advantage of sharing the work is that we share the ownership with clients and even sometimes end users. We are always working as a team, and think of our partners as a part of that team. We believe that facilitating the best from all people on the team is a big part of the design process.

For many other designers, it's really easy to get lost in their ideas (and ego). They may discard ideas that come from people they believe have less expertise in the subject. However, we believe it's important to remember that we’re almost never designing for ourselves, but for others. so we should never rely solely on our own opinions.

With that said, we’re the experts, so listening doesn’t mean that we blindly execute whatever is suggested, it just means that we don’t ignore it. We take it to heart, we detach our ego from your design, and we really try to see wether or not it makes sense to do something about it.

5. We Design In Stages

Our approach varies from project to project based on customer needs, but we generally follow these steps:

• Stage 1: The General Idea This is a rough sketch that illustrates a logo concept, a couple wireframes that show an interaction flow, or some key frames that show what the animation is going to be. This really depends on what is the task at hand, but the sketch is always a good starting point.

• Stage 2: Expanding The Idea This is a version of what your idea can become, but don't worry about all of the details. Back to the previous examples, this can be your logo with a couple applications; a very rough prototype; or an animatic.

• Stage 3: Finalize This is when we're close to be done, and we start crafting your logo using proper grids and golden ratio; we make a higher fidelity prototype; or the final animation.

This doesn’t just help us focus, it will also help others look at our work and give feedback adequate to the stage that it is in, for instance, we avoid getting comments about color when we're just trying to see if the general idea works.In short, it's never a good idea to do something from top to bottom and then share it, because you'll spend time on details, you'll get attached and you might realize that is was all for nothing.We optimize our time and focus on the right thing at the right moment.

In Short…

We optimize our time, so you invest in the right thing at the right time.

We don't design in isolation, we step away from our design and get other perspectives, this only helps us move faster, even if it sometimes means we start from scratch. See the bright side, the sooner we realize that, the better. This also sets up the groundwork for us to do truly data led design.