Designing as part of the target audience
UX // UI Project // Q2-2021
The task I was given
To my surprise and shock, I was asked to design a graphic design tool for our product suite. A theme of our suite is being able to run a marketing department within it. The disconnect being hat clients had to leave our software to produce visual assets and then come back to upload within our products.
What was my planing process like?
It was a bit surreal breaking down my day-today for this project. I basically interviewed myself to breakdown the smallest amount of tools that were the most useful things to produce a wide array of digital assets and an easy way to put it together. Because surely we didn’t have the manpower to create Canva and if we did, we would probably be making something different.
What was my production process like?
Designed in Sketch, after kickoff meetings the prime objectives were to 1) establish document size 2) Have the basic tools+gestures+shortcuts to create shapes, text, images, upload industry data from our databases 3) Export in a variety of file extensions.
This project was difficult in the sense that I knew the experience and UI aspects so well, I would go a bit faster and miss details in between, but fortunately it was such a barebones MVP that most of it was the act of using something because editing documents is usually a straightforward toolbar—->edit box experience.
What did I deliver?
We actually pulled off something that surprised me. Most projects have the ability to evolve within the product lifecycle easily. Where I work, you might have a development problem where you may have to pivot or we were designing for a client and they paid us to change the scope of work midway through.
This was the most straightforward project I have worked on and the most gratifying aspect was seeing clients create elaborate documents that were many pages in length and they actually looked pretty good considering we only had shapes, images , text and our database uploader.
“I don’t usually use most of our products because I do not work in that industry, but this is the first time that t I was actually proud that it was something I would use if I was a core user and seeing other marketers produce within it was a proud moment for me no matter how many times it happens.”
You’ll find this article all over the web about the difference between JR. & SR. designers is knowing which features to settle on and fight over. I had fierce recommendations of what I thought would make it an indispensable tool and I didn’t get them approved and I still very much believe it would have been better, but for the development time attributed to the project and the resources at our disposal I think we have achieved a balance that satisfies every rung of the stakeholder, from marketing staff to management, to be able to create an asset from scratch and share it to a wide base of their audience as a central part of their business marketing efforts.
“Experiencing something regularly and communicating it to an audience are two drastically different things”
— Me assuming I could just jump into this project easily