Design Process
When we need to create a new feature or improvement for the product we go through the following process before starting to develop.
Identify Problems/needs
Identify the problems/needs the different user personas are experiencing when using our platform. We mainly work with three user personas
- Store Owners
- Readers/Consumers
- Admins
When facing a new challenge that could be improve an existing feature or implementing a new one, we try first to understand what does it means for each one of the previous profiles, what are the pains, needs, benefits or caveats for everyone.
We understand this problems mainly from the feedback the Support team receives from our existing customers and by making some interviews to people in the company and outside the company.
Benchmark
Once the need/problem has been properly identified, we then try to see how others have addressed this issue.
For the moment we are looking at other platforms that we believe are leaders in our market segment. We take into account two kinds of characteristics: Reader design & store behavior and design
- Shopify
- Tiendanube
- Patreon
- Aer.io
- Gumroad
- Wix
- Google Play Books
- Apple Books
- Issuu
- Scribd
LowFi & HiFi Mockups
After we have a clear view of the problem and how it can be addressed we then proceed to build a proposal of our own solution. We try to do this in two stages:
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LowFi Mockups: Drawings, Murals, the most simple way to express an idea to the rest of the company that could be further improved with the proper feedback.
-
HiFi Mockups: A most acurate mockup of the application that can be shared with other members of the company or even with third parties or external users. In this stage it's important to consider all related UI language, UX and Wording, check it with Marketing.
We use the following tools to help us in this phase:
And the following websites serves as inspiration
Feedback collection
When the mockups are ready its time to get feedback from the public, inside and outside the company. At this stage we try to include:
- People from different ages
- Different relationships with technology, people that are tech savy and people that do not get along with technology
- Different user persona, readers, admins, managers.
- People that have never seen publica.la
- Advisors
We share the mockups on the Slack Channel #desing-feedback, prepare a google sheet to gather all feedback and analyse it further.
Tasks definition
After we have enough feedback then we proceed to define the tasks for further development in GitLab. We try to include:
- Detailed explanation of the problem and proposal for solution
- Mockups
- Feedback that we have selected as valid and useful