Fast design

Every design lead has a problem — how to improve their designers? Doing it regularly to benefit the designers, the lead, and the company would be fun and not dull. But, unfortunately, finding an appropriate tool is quite a difficult task.

When I had this problem, I couldn’t find such a tool and came up with my own. Thinking about this problem, I set two conditions.

1. First, limit the time so the designer wouldn’t be tempted to solve the task endlessly and achieve perfection.
2. Second, participants should only know a little about the task beforehand, so they can’t prepare.

The experiment determined the most optimal time for solving the task — it turned out to be 2 hours. The experience was successful. Next, it was necessary to improve the tool: to give interesting tasks, develop assessment criteria, and collect feedback.

As a result, the tool turned out to be so versatile and practical that it can be used to quickly improve designers, both from a UI and development use cases. And most importantly, designers improve their conceptual thinking. It turned out that this is the most important thing for which fast design was invented.

Conceptual thinking

It is necessary to explain in detail why this is important. Conceptual thinking is the ability to think outside the box. When a designer can propose an unexpected idea or concept, it’s not only suggested but also visualized, worked out, justified, and thought about monetization.

It sounds like a fantasy, but that’s the point. With developed conceptual thinking, a designer can easily propose several reasonable solutions to a single task in a short amount of time. That’s why fast design is necessary.

Another feature of the tool is the diagnosis of professional skills and the identification of growth areas. Fast design helps the designer and design lead understand the current skill level. What I pay attention to first:

1. conceptual thinking,
2. UI,
3. pitching,
4. decision-making speed.

Weak and strong skills are revealed immediately after finishing a fast design. For example, some designers need more time management skills. They may have incorrectly allocated their time and spent it on coming up with ideas but were required to work on them. Or they may have become engrossed in working on the UI based on a simple idea.

Tool Flexibility

Fast design is flexible and confidently adapts itself to its tasks. Fast design is flexible and confidently customizable for your own needs and tasks. Suitable for large teams as well as for individual classes. For juniors (especially juniors), middles, and seniors. For product designers and communications. Approach tasks flexibly. For example, product designers were tasked with “Design an iOS app for Santa Claus”. It is optional to design a non-existent service. However, developing a new concept for the product the team is working on would work well. Communication designers will gladly create stories. The main thing is to formulate the task clearly and without any restrictions. Ideally, in one sentence.

Assessment Criteria

Formulate the criteria by which you will evaluate work and give feedback. What is important to me:

1. production-level layouts,
2. interesting idea,
3. worked out use case (or use cases) and key screens,
4. Retention Rate.

Next, let’s break down the criteria. No gray squares and circles. Layouts should have a good UI. Imagine that after fast design, you hand them over to the developer for layout. You need to approach screen drawing with this in mind. To avoid wasting time on component development, you can take ready-made elements from some publicly available library and change them to your liking. Refrain from expanding yourself to non-existent technologies. The crazier the idea, the better. Here, the designer took into account all 4 criteria. The designer is great.

Some designers approach a task formally, but there is nothing to evaluate. For example, in the case of an application for Santa Claus, the designer takes a ready-made mail client interface and works out the states. This should not be done elsewhere.

Formal approach to solving the problem

When onboarding, telling the team to work on the prominent use cases and key screens is essential. A common mistake is to overthink the details.

There is no need to design authentication or secondary states. However, the retention rate is an important criterion. Keeping the calculation formula or a period in mind is unnecessary: daily, weekly, or monthly. It is enough to think about what will make customers use the product regularly.

Santa Claus regularly checks his reindeer and takes care of them

Cheat Sheet

1. Conduct a complete onboarding. Explain why it is necessary, what it will give the designer and the peculiarities of fast design.
2. Determine evaluation criteria.
3. Find a person who will organize the event and evaluate the work. Usually, this is a design lead.
4. Create an exciting task, for example, “Design an iOS application for Santa Claus.”
5. Reserve a slot on the designer’s calendar in advance.
6. Explain the task a few minutes before the start. The recommended time for completion is 2 hours.
7. Give feedback correctly: not from the perspective that the designer failed the task, but what was liked and what can be improved.
8. Be sure to discuss the results with the team.
9. If necessary, determine the winner. You can award a prize based on the results of the vote. But it is not needed.

Fast design is stressful. Do not give tasks every week. Everything is individual: you can hold it once every 2 weeks.

I will be glad to receive feedback. You can reach me by e-mail (ya@artwalek.ru) or by Telegram @artwalek.