What exactly turns good design into great design?

The impact of well-done design speaks louder now than ever. Current events raised the bar in terms of visual representation. Branding stands for your company by itself, just like a guardian. UX/UI design isn't only about a visual journey. It’s about the experience of your audience and how the ideas unfold. Thus, there’s no doubt when saying the Design Department is the silent problem solver. 

This article brings insightful updates and upgrades in terms of technical skills, Adobe XD, Figma, as well as do’s and don’ts in the collaboration with clients and colleagues from Linnify’s Head of Design Department, Andrada Farcaș.

As proof of her perpetual development and diverse knowledge enhancements over the years, Andrada makes a different use out of her creative tools today. She is introducing us to the ‘behind the scenes’ of the Design process’ challenges and her department’s growth. 

Details don’t only make the difference in this domain. They’re its very core. Even more, Design has the widest disposition from the audience when it comes to opinions. For as visual as their work is, the Design department comes through multiple unseen dares. Andrada is here to make us get the bigger picture.

What’s there to do if not continuously update yourself and your team to stay on track in the fast lane of design?

I wasn’t always the heart of design. But surely there was design in my heart. 

Having studied Computer Science, it’s safe to say I had another vision of creativity for a while. 

Everything design-related started through volunteering in college. Then it built up to coordinating the Visual department for OSUT (the Student Organization of Technical University). Next thing I knew I switched from an initial iOS Developer role to the Design Responsible here at Linnify. 

Since I joined early, as the department was forming, not only was I in love with design, but I could naturally relate well-enough with the vision and values of the company to nurture the development of the department as the Head of Design.

One day I read an article with which I resonated in workflow, logic, and overall views to be honest. Thus, it makes so much sense to me to begin with this simple and clear quote:

'A UI without UX is like a painter slapping paint onto a canvas without thought. 

A UX without UI is like the frame of a sculpture with no paper mache on it.'

A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. They are both vital for the product's success.

There's a lot going on in the Design department. From researching to prioritizing and finding order in the creative process. The environment says a lot when it comes to results. The flow doesn’t only refer to the phases of UX/UI, it’s the whole process inside the department. 

There are a lot of blockers along the process, but I came to realize that if you need to embrace them with your team, results won’t cease to appear. 

I will talk about the technical side of things in a minute but first, I will give the stage to the ones accountable for materializing the vision.

Teamwork makes the dream work

It’s essential to have a team sharing the same values so that it comes naturally to the group to ease the workload. I came to observe how identifying the blockers and solving them efficiently has a lot to do with building a common wide perspective within the team. By constantly exercising the vision you embed new issue-overcoming defaults to your team. 

All of this implies:

1. Starting off with clear growth-mindset oriented values
2. Time spent together
3. Extra learning sessions on communication.

Being the Head of Department does bring responsibility to the table to anticipate and nurture work relations in the smoothest way possible. 

Depending on the size of the company, chances are people will have different time spans to spend to actually get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Given the emotional side of creativity, I’m grateful to have had a team where it came naturally to all of us to pay attention to the corresponding needs of each member so that the tasks met both their personalities and abilities.

After all, there’s no result if your team is not there to make things happen. 

Aside from the vision shared here at Linnify, ‘unity’ is a game-changer alongside ‘authenticity’ allowing individuals to carry on genuinely.

Is the test of our civilization, finding unity in diversity?

‘Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.’ - Steve Jobs

What’s remarkable in my day-to-day work-life is to see how the team completes each other due to their diverse backgrounds. It creates such a multidisciplinary perspective. And that’s exactly what makes it possible to find the most thought-through approach to bring the clients’ product into the spotlight. It’s so much more than visuals. It’s a whole story unfolding. 

Here are our founding chapters of the story:

Psychology

UX/UI has its conceptual roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology. It is considered the blueprint of a human being's interaction with machines. Thus, having a graduate in Psychology is a great asset in our design decisions. Understanding human tendencies, reasoning, decision principles, brings value in creating relevant navigation in the user flow. 

Arts and Design

Intertwined with all the other UX/UI must-haves is, of course, the very art of it. Subconsciously, having in-store and using all the concepts taught through the University of Arts and Design, the department is able to direct even more attention to the right details. And that’s what brings the real relevancy into the conversation.

Technical 

Technically speaking, design shouldn't stand alone in such a digitalized environment, so, including my Computer Science background among our designers, the Design department is able to see more clearly and deliver on-point hand-offs to the Development team, having in mind the sprints that follow.

'Design is about co-creation: in order to create great products, a collaboration between Marketing, Development and Design teams is key.'

Great tools improve the way you think

For now, we know who’s responsible for the creative work, it’s time we dive into what tools are needed to deliver the designs. I genuinely believe we inevitably adapt our creative thought process to the tools we use. This is why I think that experimenting with different design tools not only brings value to the mind-processes but also clarity and efficiency in knowing the most suitable tool for the project. 

What stands before any choice of tools is the timeless design process framework.

The Design Process 

'The Designer is not the User'

1.User and Market research

There are plenty of ways to conduct User and Market Researches. The secret is to get familiarized with their patterns to know how to apply them in different project types. This part is often seen as challenging, yet it is mandatory to have it in mind. I will link some resources at the end of the article for you to check.

2.Branding 

Well, this could’ve been a whole chapter but perhaps we’ll tackle this later. 

In terms of branding, there’s so much to talk about. And it is highly dependent on the moment the client approaches you. They might have already started going live with a certain color palette, logo, or others. 

No projects are alike. Treating each project as a separate individual with its own needs and wishes highlights authenticity and adds meaning.

We are familiar with delivering brand style guide proposals and depending on the needs, a stationery suite, a pack for the social display identity consisting of different digital and printed materials. And what we constantly strive for is being consistent with our design decisions. 

We are devoted to adaptability, yet through design principles. They act as a value statement tied to the goals of the product for the users.

3.User Journey mapping

This moment belongs to the user personas, user scenarios, user flow creation, and wireframing. What this step does is to really align the team. And if it’s just a one-designer work, it really aligns your workload, thought process. Creating the user flow brings direction. Wireframes feel like the steps walking in that direction. 

4.UI Prototype building 

High-fidelity prototypes are something we truly enjoy creating. We focused on this due to the product’s need to run User Tests to ensure everything is on point. We’ve recently had a training with a dear trainer of ours, and we had the chance to observe that designers have different appeals to methods and frankly even prioritization systems. Some designers go for the hi-fidelity, some document the process much more in-depth and they support their flow by text explanation. I think each designer and department needs to find their customized best practices in order to deliver quality services while maintaining their mental health and pleasant work environment. Documenting along the way it’s very useful to all stakeholders including clients, developers, designers.

The Technologies

The aim is to build in-depth know-how on each tool to be able to choose the most suitable tool per project. One of the traits of the department is by far our adaptability. What I mean by that is that we all have this embedded: to understand and deliver to the needs of the product.

This article is an after-effect of a learning session the Department had last week. As we all understand the need to constantly update our skill sets, sooner than later, we synchronize and start discovering new ways to raise the bar. 

Going for the details with Figma and Bogdan Zenecan 

One of our learning sessions from 2021 was focused on tools, Figma to be more precise. 

As Figma is perhaps the very first one in the rankings of popularity, we all wanted to know even more about it. 

We have invited Bogdan Zenecan, Independent Product Designer, to share his wisdom gained in over 10 years of experience within the Design world and its tools.

As I previously mentioned, we are the type of people who like to experiment and we worked with Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma, to name a few. Our learning process was somewhat similar to any tool we used. We liked to discover them untrained, to find our pattern of work, to see how they were thought and built, then we went on and took a specialized online course getting to know the tips and tricks of others. Why we do things like this is to understand the thought process of the UX/UI designers who build these tools for the very same domain. 

Figma x Adobe XD x Sketch x other tools?

While discovering Figma one thing we instantly realized is that, comparing it to Adobe Xd or Sketch, the interface was more detailed with many more tools and shortcuts that needed to be learned to make the most out of it. 

Adobe XD

The tool we used most up to this point was Adobe XD. Given the fact that Linnify nurtures various growing start-ups, the Design department's projects were also quite diverse. Therefore, our adaptation skills have been put to good use. 

Working with start-ups is indeed exciting in terms of guiding their progress from the early stages through design and development. But one thing start-ups are discovering as they go is how much the project will grow generally speaking but, especially, in terms of design. 

For as user-friendly as Adobe XD is, one blocker we identified was the loading issue. As projects grew, we acknowledged multiple limitations when the projects grew and needed to be restructured to fasten the uploading process. 

One thing we used to do was to work locally and then upload it to XD, and that would speed up the process. As projects and libraries started growing in complexity, Adobe XD’s performance wasn’t the most suitable for how we wanted to deliver. Yet, it was quite cool that XD gives you the liberty to work both locally and in the cloud. One other thing we liked about this tool was that it was easy to share with the Development department. One link packed with all the resources needed was sometimes all they needed to complete their sprint. But the developers felt the loading issue even more than we did. So, we felt the need to upgrade our design weapons.

Figma

Figma does bring a lot to the game, especially because it’s all in the cloud. It's been surveyed as the most exciting tool of 2021.

Its multiplayer technology makes collaboration much easier (if curious, check the resources). But not everything with this tool comes with ease. It’s a little more complicated in terms of use. And this is where Bogdan Zenecan guided us on how to build logic with the app and at the same time ownership in our workflow. 

Our key questions on Figma regarded the design system, the prototype, and components. And one single answer kinda responded as a solid foundation to all of them:

You need to be structured and organized in your work. Anticipate and prioritize well.

Regarding the design system, what Zenecan introduced to us was the Atomic Design structure. As mentioned, Figma makes your work clearer. You need to name your layers, frames, and components. Why is that more important than naming your layers and all in Adobe XD for example? Because the Devs need it. 

The hand-off to the developers acts differently with Figma. You can’t just share a link as you would with Adobe XD. You now give them access to the project and thus, your Development team also needs a little Figma training in their workflow. 

Regarding prototypes, we still love the high-fidelity ones. Yet, we came to realize that there are other ways to support your project. Written documentation regarding the steps also brings value to the UX/UI process of designers. Depending on your style of work and your department’s, I believe it’s key to find what works best for each and all of you.

It definitely changes the way you think your work through. There’s always so much to learn, and I know this domain grows more and more every day. So for those of you who are passionate about it, and for those of you who already work with these. Take this as an open invitation for our future insights regarding UX/UI. 

Beyond the technical skills: the dos and the don’ts in collaboration

Our take-away from this learning session wasn’t just technicalities. We consolidated our collaboration-oriented understructure through respect, empathy with clients, users, and your team.

‘For a good collaboration, we need to find the best method of communication for each person.’

As for what you can take away regarding clients, what I want to leave with you is: your argumentation on Design decisions must have a solid theoretical foundation. Read a lot, be up-to-date but most importantly, don’t forget to be human. Empathy is a wise teacher and always a good guide through the changes.

Depending on your company, the collaboration with your clients might be different from ours. Here, the Sales department understands the client’s design needs just as much as they understand us. That brings clarity when it comes to allocating the most suitable members for the product. Therefore, the decision is not based only on their skill set but also on their personalities.

Every collaboration is unique. And it’s the Designer who takes on the responsibility to find the balance between the clients and the users. 

‘To conclude, if Marketing, UX and Development are well combined together, the customer will not only be happy, but they will also enjoy the unified experiences before and after their encounter with the product.’

To conclude this article, here are Andrada’s takeaway tips:

1.Nurture the environment

Creating friends at work is not only going to make your network richer, it will enrich the quality of your work through consistent honest, and relevant feedback within the group

2. Create a solid theoretical foundation for your work

Not only will you find ease subconsciously while completing tasks, but you will also have a stronger argumentation while supporting your design decisions within your stakeholders’ meetings.

3.Mirror your identity within your work

When choosing your specialty, always check in with yourself to verify if what you want to do on a daily basis is in line with your values.

Resources:

The article I mentioned at the beginning

On the psychology of UX/UI

On User Journey mapping

On UX/UI Research Methods

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