Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ellen Dong

Working as a minority of the team is hard.

I joined a machine learning startup two years ago to design visualizations for data scientists. This is my first full-time job, and I am their first product designer. With my limited practical experience, I didn’t really know how to work with the team. I didn’t even know a lot about machine learning and data scientists who will be my main collaborators and my users.

It is just so easy to be ignored and become ‘someone who make UI’ after all the product decisions are made. During that time, the biggest question in my mind besides the product experience is: How to increase the voice of design in an API driven company? The question was being asked partially because I hope experience is something could also drive product decision and partially because I don’t want to only focus on design execution.

As an intrinsic part of human nature, I started to try different methods I learnt from books and medium, wanted to answer that question, such as Design Sprint, regular usability study, lean UX…

Some worked out, and some didn’t.

Today, we’ve established a good design process in our team and everyone (especially people on product side) understands the importance of user experience. I earned the chance to join high level meetings to help define the features and overall experience. It’s still an ongoing learning process, but I think there are some lessons to share. Hopefully, it could help people who are also in the same state as I was before.

We are a team, not you are the developers and I am the designer.

Everyone knows how important it is to make friends with your co-workers. Building a healthy relationship and knowing each other personally just helps the design proposal to go through much faster and easier.

The trick I learnt here is not simply to make friends, but also to build partnership with others. Stop emphasizing that I am the designer and I own the product experience, but try to set the frame before every meeting that we are all belong to the same team and work toward the same goal: making awesome product. Don’t set the boundary such as this is engineering problem, this is PM problem, this is design problem. As those problems emerge, actively involve in the discussions. That just gives me so many opportunities to learn how everyone thinks and make sure there is always a voice from UX side to drive decision making.

Earn credit through every interaction

Credit is something really helps me navigate through different teams. There is no shortcut to earn credits besides being a reasonable person and deliver high quality design work. People around may not know how to evaluate the design, but they have fine-tuned radar to tell how reliable I am as I speak and behave, and they will share that piece of observation with others.

At the end, the leadership team and other team members will have some consensus on who you are. So just be responsible of everything you say and present. This is something usually being ignored, but amazingly helpful when I want to achieve more in the team.

Pervasive design education

It’s not developer or PM’s job to understand design. But it doesn’t mean I should stop trying to educate them. Working in a developer-centric team, there is no other way to make design count. I used to try Design Sprint in the company, but found it too difficult to change other people’s way of thinking. Not everyone is a visual thinker. So when I asked people to generate ideas on sticky notes, it was just terrible. After trying a couple of other activities, I gave up of all the formal ways of design education:P

Instead, I make it informal and less intimidating. Here is an example, we do stand up everyday, whenever I give a UX specific word, such as ‘user scenario’, ‘Interaction spec’, I will provide enough context of ‘what, why, and how’ in an easy-to-understand way. So everyone in the team could understand not only what I am doing, but also why I am doing and how it could relate with performance of the product. Embedding design education in the daily communication is something we can do all the time. Whenever there is a quick solution, just double check by asking “ what is the user scenario?” “what is the problem we are trying to solve for users” , people will start to approach the same problem from UX perspective and after a few times, they will be prepared to answer those questions in advance.

Establish design process step by step

The benefit of building design process in a sole-designer product team is different from a real design team. In small product team, design process provides a guideline for others understand what I am working on, and what should they expect from me. It helps others understand the value of design is not simply making product look pretty, but also making product useful and friendly by going through a well-defined process (with some level of flexibility), starting from ‘defining the problem’.

However, building a design process is not an easy thing since this involves a lot of effort from different people. Questions will be explored, such as “how we start to define a design problem”, “ how to review the design with product manager” “how to hand off design to developers”. And this is another topic worth a long blog post. So, stay tuned.

These are four major lessons I learnt in the past one and a half years. There are definitely some other good attributes could help improve sole-designer’s situation, such as speaking up, taking initiative to solve problems, thinking of building a design team in the beginning. I don’t feel I’ve done those enough, so I didn’t go through them in details in this article.

If you have any tips of increasing the voice of design, please also share! Let’s make sole-designer a happier designer in the work.

Work as a sole designer in a product team was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Work as a sole designer in a product team

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