decision, decisions - tom petty, gocardless - byte breakfast

@tpByte28th January 2016www.383project.com

Decisions, Decisions:Designing products with a point of view.

AVOIDING IDENTITY CRISIS

- You do this by celebrating tough decisions and trade-offs, and their consequences, rather than smoothing them away

- This is important because it will give your product a clear identity, meaning users will know if it’s for them or not, what to do with it, and how they should use it

- I’m going to go through a few things we’ve tried to achieve this at GoCardless- In the process I’ll show you some really shitty work that thankfully never made the

cut

- GoCardless make recurring payments software- Process $1bn every year…

- For companies like TripAdvisor, Box.com, The Guardian, The FT, The DVLA

- We started with a small business offering- Ideal for small subscription businesses, like gyms

- But wanted to move into serving larger organisations- So we kept our small business product, and built something for enterprises- We soon discovered there was a huge gap between the two

- Everyone falls into into the middle- These are accountants, agencies, start-ups — any business that grows when they’re with us

- We’re now focused on a product to bridge that gap- Something that will work for everyone

- ‘Something for everyone’ is a red flag as a designer- How on earth can you do that?- And how can you do it whilst avoiding an identity crisis?- I’m going to show you how we’re exploring this challenge- Hopefully some of it will be useful for you, too

- Trying to build something for everyone leads to something for no one.- There are plenty of examples of this happening elsewhere

- We’ve done the same thing

- This is an early attempt at something for small and large businesses- Ignore the shitty UI- It’s the content that worries me

- Thousands of tiny decisions and trade-offs- Celebrate the fact you’re not pleasing everyone- Trust, that they will thank you for it in the long-run- They won’t thank you for the opposite

- you need to know what it’s not as well as what it is- because if you don’t…

- You’ll end up building something for no one

- Beg stole and borrowed processes and best practices from some awesome people- I used to work for an agency where I learned a lot about designing with purpose in mind- Three things we do to inject a point of view and opinion into our work, hopefully some of them are useful to you

- If you want to create something for a diverse group of people, you need to know who they are- vegetable boxes to box.com- So we dug in to our merchant base to find out what jobs they hire us to do…

- Merchants range from 1 person…

- …to 100,000

- Our competitors are everything from custom banking integrations…

- … to cash in hand- So, what questions do they ask of your product?- What jobs do they hire us to do?

- Small businesses hire us to…- Improve their cashflow- Teach them about their business- Reduce hassle

- Professional services hire us to…- Improve cashflow- Save admin time- Work for their clients, too

- Large enterprises hire us to…- Reduce payment failures- Automate the process- White label everything

- What unites everyone?- Who should you give most attention to?

- So once we know what our users ask of us, we can create something to respond to- ‘Provocations’ (or ‘questions’) are what start us down the road of injecting a point of view

- The unit of building a product is the project

- This is controlled by ‘The Roadmap’- An all powerful presence in the organisation

- Roadmaps are just a list of shit to do

- Usually discreet projects- ‘Password reset’, or ‘settings’- Put it all together and you probably have a product…

- But it can end up like homer’s unfinished robot- just desperate for legs- A seemingly random collection of features- we wanted a roadmap of questions, not answers

- Things that map directly to the needs of our users- We want to answer the questions they ask of our product- Borrowed the format from IDEO, used to use it at Wolff Olins for big brand transformations. - Works well for small projects too

- Hopefully it will lead to a product designed to meet the exact needs of its users

- I know, I know- We know that getting something built is all about making decisions & having a point of view- As a design team, we use principles framed as choices to help us make good design decisions- You all know about design principles

- It started with Deiter Rams’ 10 principles of good design- Good design is honest, inevitable, long-lasting etc.

- GDS bought them online with their awesome design principles- We wanted to have a go- We started really badly

- This stuff is hygiene, it’s the baseline for a product- It needs to be a point of view, meaning you should be able to disagree with it, just like in real life

- The reverse needs to be a valid strategy / opinion- You need to consciously inject that point of view to bring it to life- We choose something over something else

Here’s an example

- Some may disagree with it, but that’s exactly the point

- The decisions you make should be real decisions- ‘Keep it simple’ isn’t a decision- After lots of debate, here’s what we settled on

- This is an example of the gnarly stuff- we might have annoyed payments pros and developers- It’s not looking them directly in the eye

- All the time someone is using us, they’re not running their business- We’ll design to prioritise the things that require our users' immediate attention — the rest can wait- Not surprising, but the total opposite strategy to something like a social site- I’d like a measure of success to be how short the average session length is

- GoCardless is designed to solve one problem really, really well. We could be great at other things, but we’ll design to ensure that we’re the best at recurring payments first.- Only examples are things we’ve NOT done: invoicing, analytics, e-commerce, loans, becoming a bank- we might have annoyed x million potential customers

- We’ve gone through this strange ‘point of view’ process, here’s an example to bring it to life

- Going back to small businesses…

- We’ve got a good understanding of their needs

- Let’s focus on how we might reduce hassle for small businesses

- This is the provocation / question on our roadmap- One way of answering that is improving the time it takes to sign up and get started- Which previously was very long

- Our old sign up form had 18 fields- We needed — and still need — them all for regulatory reasons- But we can delay when we ask for that info…

- and get it down to 5- it means you can be taking payments in 30 seconds- this might annoy pro users with all the info to hand- but it helps small businesses. and we choose small users over all users

- We’ve seen how we’re trying to inject a point of view into the design of GoCardless- and I guess we can apply some of this to the restaurant at the end of my road, the tapas / indian / coffee / club fusion I mentioned- Perhaps they could adopt some design principles. - I had a think of some on the train on the way up- The best I could come up with were ‘tapas over terrible coffee’ or ‘curry over clubnights’- At least that might help them with their identity crisis

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