Once I realized I couldn’t start by creating the most Dribbble-worthy thing, I knew I’d have to begin with the unglamorous, frustrating, but weirdly wonderful work of mapping out how the product’s content could better be structured. Since we’re redesigning an existing product, I assumed this would be fairly straightforward: the functionality was already in place, and my job was just to structure it in a more easily navigable way.
I started by handing off a few wireframes of the key screens to the developer, and that’s when the questions began rolling in: “If we move this content into a modal, how will it affect this similar action here?” “What happens if they don’t add video tags, but they do add a description?” “What if the user has a title that is 500 characters long?” “What if they want their video to be private to some users, but accessible to others?”.
How annoying (but really, fantastic) that people use our product in so many ways. Turns out, product design isn’t about laying out elements in the most ideal scenario for the user that’s most convenient for you. As product designers, we have to foresee every outcome, and anticipate every potential user need.
Which brings me to another annoying epiphany: if you want to do it well, and account for every user, product design is so much more snarly and tangled than you’d expect going in. I began with a simple goal: to improve the experience on just one of our key product pages. However, every small change impacts every part of the product to some degree, and that impact has to be accounted for. Every decision is based on assumptions that have to be tested; I test my assumptions by observing users, talking to the team, wireframing, and prototyping. Many of my assumptions are wrong. There are days when it’s incredibly frustrating, because an elegant solution for users with one goal will complicate life for users with another goal. It’s vital to solve as many scenarios as possible, even though this is slow, sometimes mind-bending work.
As a side bonus, wireframing and prototyping every potential state in a product is tedious, but your developers will thank you for it. It’s not their job to solve what happens when there’s an empty state, error, or edge case. Showing you’ve accounted for these scenarios will win a developer’s respect; failing to do so will frustrate them.