Deeper design for next-level products
Using audits, workshops, and feedback sessions to design better products by thinking deeply
As a designer, solving problems is part of your job. The typical product designer is tasked with crafting solutions for product opportunities and user challenges. Creating two-dimensional work that represents a single point of view is straightforward. Yet designing truly great products requires a deeper understanding beyond following a set of instructions.
Not sure if you’re doing two-dimensional work? Symptoms of two-dimensional work include:
- Executing on an assigned task list without question
- Minimizing collaboration and communication with others on the project
- Accepting initial work as “good enough”
The output is emergent and functional, but it lacks the attention to detail seen in a mature product. It can be a place to start, particularly if you’re building the first version of a product, but it’s not a place to stay.
Three-dimensional work involves a deeper look at the problem. It might take the form of the following:
- Exploring multiple solutions to a problem
- Engaging in back-and-forth dialogue with team members in other roles
- Using strategic tools like workshops to challenge assumptions and generate alternate perspectives
While it might be satisfying to solve problems at a surface level, it is not a place of growth for a design or a product. Quality in equals quality out, and more considered thinking yields better work. At Shopify, designers use a number of both evaluative and generative processes to go deeper. I’m going to share these methods to enable you to think more deeply and design better products.
Evolved thinking, better products
Let me explain. Consider the evolution of the office chair. It’s a mundane object, part of the daily work routine: sit down, log in to your computer, and start typing. An office chair is an artifact of the industrial revolution. It emerged based on the need to supply an information worker a place for thinking and computing. Yet the office chair itself has evolved over time. Did the actual requirements of an information worker change from the early industrial age to the modern digital era? The human form has remained relatively stable. But the thinking about the problem itself did change.
Early office chairs had a distinct Victorian flavor, shaped by cultural norms and a desire for opulence. As decades passed, the office chair evolved from an ornate statement piece to a more utilitarian seat. Starting in the 1920s, Western modernists started to distill a chair to its essence, experimenting with reduction in form. By the 1960s, furniture designers also began to consider how to apply ergonomic principles to the chair structure. Office chairs could be both elegant in design and beneficial to physical well-being. This improved engineering allowed workers to avoid physical discomfort and focus on their knowledge problems. The result? A more invisible desk experience that also supported the ever-increasing need for digital work. You might even find yourself sitting in a modern ergonomic chair as you read this article. As the thinking got deeper, the products got better.
Going deep on the Shopify Theme Store
A recent example of how we went deeper as a design team at Shopify is the new thinking for the Shopify Theme Store. The theme store offers different templates that can be customized for Shopify stores and saves the time and energy required to develop a quality store layout.
I spoke to three product designers on the Shopify Ecosystem team: MP, Kaitlyn, and Chris, who all worked on the new Shopify Theme Store. They shared several tactics they recently used to probe below the surface of a product problem and design more deeply.
“What we do in the theme store affects what platform a merchant might select for their ecommerce site,” said MP, who focused on improving mobile store interactions. “We want to make it easy for them to succeed with Shopify.”
While the theme store functioned well enough, the product structure hadn’t been revisited in some time and had fallen behind contemporary needs, like mobile browsing. It clearly had the potential to be better. How did these designers apply three-dimensional thinking to the problem? Product audits and workshops with product teams.
Existing product audit
This technique involves assessing the current product against a set of heuristics and design principles. What works well, and what falls short? Having a defined set of criteria can enable objective thinking and prevent blanket statements like “let’s make it better.”
Kaitlyn is a champion for holistic product thinking. “When I’m working on a product audit, I build a spreadsheet with issues, create visual references of the problems, and note alignment principles to help pinpoint areas of opportunity. This is great for building consensus among team members.”
If you’re interested in conducting a product audit, these resources from Nielsen Norman are great for kickstarting your work and can be layered with other internal assessments.
- Ten Usability Heuristics: helpful rules-of-thumb for evaluating existing product presentation and functionality
- Five Principles of Visual Design: considerations for visual harmony in a product
Workshops with product teams
One way to uncover new ideas is through dedicated workshop sessions. Cross-disciplinary dialogue between designers, engineers, and product managers can unlock a richer perspective. Depending on your needs, there are a number of different workshop styles that can be explored.
Two specific workshops the team used were the following:
Generative vision workshop: The purpose of a vision workshop is to understand what could be. Constraints like “it might take months for dev to build that” are temporarily suspended, and all ideas are noted. The team ran several different exercises to generate big ideas, and they focused on both what was achievable within the year and also what could be done within the next few years.
Jobs to be done workshop: This workshop focused on the needs of merchants browsing the Shopify Theme Store. Jobs to be done statements are written in a first-person format like this: “When [situation happens], I want to [take this action], so that I can [achieve expected outcome].” The jobs to be done framework is a great way to simplify complex product problems, and at its heart is the question: “What must happen in order for the product to address key user needs”?
Team members individually wrote statements based on collective knowledge and research, then came together as a group to create an affinity diagram that clustered like ideas together. After identifying these patterns, the team agreed on several key themes and used them as a focus for design work.
Designing and assessing concepts
With the workshop insights in mind, the designers began to create concepts. “We know people are shopping more on their phones,” said Chris. “So it made sense to showcase mobile theme imagery. We want merchants to know that the theme quality is there, and all device use cases are addressed.”
One core job to be done was to allow merchants to scan theme options more efficiently so that they could more rapidly decide what theme was best for their store. Chris focused on offering more informative previews that summarized the core features of a theme and explored different ways to make the content more scannable. MP dove into optimizing the mobile patterns of the theme store itself and presenting information more effectively on the small screen.
Peer feedback sessions
Each week, the ecosystem team at Shopify has several opportunities for designers to solicit peer feedback through critiques. Sharing work early and often is important. To keep adjacent designers updated on their work, MP and Chris regularly presented their progress at peer critiques.
Critiquing product design is an art. “My advice is not to get too attached to your ideas,” said MP. “Don’t limit yourself to something that could be much better.”
Framing the work process and presenting a particular point of view is imperative. It’s normal to feel self-conscious about sharing, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. One tip is to take notes while others give feedback and review them later for patterns and action items. For more on how to share your work effectively, consider these principles for sharing work.
Team feedback sessions
Another feedback method that can be used to evolve work is gathering input from the full team. Chris recounted his experience and how it helped the team to move faster. “We constantly shared with the greater team, including our front and back end developers,” he noted. “If they wanted to do preliminary work on evolved concepts, they could.”
This agile approach helped the development team to identify performance improvements and when a spike might be needed to evaluate a certain aspect of the design.
Moving toward a solution
Design concepts are only effective at creating change when the working product is launched. In the end, the theme store team launched an experiment to evaluate their reconsidered work. The results indicated that the new design and applied product thinking more successfully engaged merchants considering themes, and plans were made for a larger store-wide rollout.
The previous Shopify Theme Store cards focused on desktop theme variation and required a trip to the theme’s detail page for further exploration. Information hierarchy was overlooked in favor of visuals.
The new Shopify Theme Store cards showcase the mobile theme variation and offer interactive theme style exploration. Typographic treatments establish an improved information hierarchy, and tags afford a deep-dive into options for specific industries. Further exploration is planned.
A continuous process
Ultimately, pursuing deeper design is not a one-and-done activity. It’s a mindset, not a formula, for creating more considered products. Deeper design introduces new ways of thinking through evaluative and generative methods. Designers who practice this gather feedback early and often, seek diverse viewpoints, and have a bias toward iteration and collaboration. Before you begin your next product design endeavor, consider how you might approach the problem more deeply.
