Cassandra Crossing the Diamond: Tips and Tricks for Aligning on Your Product

Transcript

hi thanks for being patient guys sorry about that um so welcome thank you for coming at five o'clock on the last day of a conference um are you ready for some design i certainly am i haven't seen much thus far um my name is chris sugg i'm a product designer at coinbase i work primarily on coinbase pro and today what i'd love to talk about is product process um i think i've learned time and time again that good process always leads to good products and i think especially for ethereum where we're at as we continue to drive towards traction and mass adoption recognizing the necessity of good product design process

i think is essential so we're going to talk a little bit about some process methodologies as well as user research specifically within those processes but first i would love to tell you guys a story if that's okay are we good with some some storytelling at the end of end of what was probably a pretty technical conference um yeah there we go all right so cassandra you may have heard her name before she is a woman from greek mythology she was a princess of troy and she caught the eye of a very powerful god apollo and so apollo fell madly in love with

cassandra so when she asked apollo for the gift of prophecy or being able to see truly into the future he agreed on the condition that she would love him in return that she would be with him if he gave her this gift and so she agreed and she got the gift of prophecy shortly thereafter she rejected him and went back on what she had said um and as many of us could probably understand in the face of unrequited love apollo was pretty pissed and so while he couldn't take back the gift of prophecy that he had given her he could curse her on top of that so he gave her prophecy but he cursed her that she would never be believed and so

you can imagine this woman who is rightly seeing into the future seeing sort of the end or the demise of people but never being believed would probably be driven somewhat mad here are a couple examples of some prophecies that cassandra put out there that were absolutely true but we're not heated by those around her the fall of troy the death of agamemnon another figure from greek mythology and these are just two of a laundry list of correct prophecies that cassandra gave and was not listened to okay so why are we talking about cassandra i'm glad you all are you know still sitting here um i think that for ux designers there are times when you are advocating for real user needs

maybe in the context of research new insights and you are met with feelings that feel a little bit like cassandra and it usually comes into place when you're trying to share those insights share those findings with other team members so for example if you're talking to members of the business side of your company and you're trying to share things that challenge very closely held assumptions or at least perceptions of our users and so what i want to do first is kind of ground us um in the process um i experienced this feeling of cassandra if you will really recently i

am i work at coinbase as i said and we decided sort of freshly that we were going to insert more user research into our design process and so i took that on um as a you know one woman research show and i conducted a bunch of research i did you know 12 user interviews i recruited everybody i dug through a bunch of old studies we had done um and i came up with this fabulous presentation and i walk into the stakeholder meeting like super jazzed we found so much interesting stuff incredible insights that could just completely connect a number of dots within our pro interface and i go in and i start to talk about that research

and maybe some of you are designers or researchers and are familiar with the eyes glazing over the phones coming out the zombie nods of kind of paying attention but not really paying attention and i could just tell that that research was not resonating it wasn't permeating those held assumptions it wasn't quite doing what it had done to me which was much like what i think it would have been for cassandra to be seeing these prophecies you know to have this moment of enlightenment where you're talking to these users and you're suddenly realizing you know i wasn't looking at that the right way i was looking at it from my perspective and now i understand but i could tell that as i was giving

these research findings it wasn't doing the same thing for them um but so let's go to this for a second because i do want to just explain overall the process that i was working from and this is nothing new if you're a designer in the room i'm sure i'm sure you've seen this before this is called the double diamond design methodology it was developed by the british design council and the idea here with this methodology is that good ideas come from first exploring a lot of ideas that to get to something interesting and new and innovative you first have to explore a lot so you can see here in the diamond it's diverging and then converging diverging and then converging and the

two sides here are labeled design the right things and design things right so the first half of this diamond is more about arriving at a problem so first let's discover let's explore all of the problems our users have ever had so the research that i was conducting was very much in this vein so what can we discover about what they what they are having trouble with and then the work to get across this diamond is to align on that to agree that this is the main problem that we want to solve and then the divergent work of designing things right is then applying design to those problems so what are the possible solutions to this what are a million possible design solutions to the problem that we have prioritized together and then what are we going to deliver

what is the best of those solutions that we have explored that we're going to go after and put out and so we're going to focus on this first diamond for the rest of the talk um as i said in my personal journey of feeling like cassandra we were in this discovery phase oh that is really loud okay um we were in this discovery phase of the first diamond and this wasn't just user interviews this was a ton of background research so we consulted past studies there was quantitative research that we were looking at there was market research that we were doing for our competitors we used quantitative metrics to find our user segmentation to then recruit these users and then i conducted in my

apartment 12 interviews over the computer and what i realized was as i've already told you the big problem was crossing this point where i was the owner of all of this sort of new insight this new information and how do i get to the other side where the rest of my team can come into that so cross-functional team members not just designers pms engineers and then sort of business-related stakeholders um how can i invite them into that research how can i invite them into this sort of transformational prophecy that is having first-hand touch with our users so how to invite cross-functional team members into user discoveries

and the kicker here is that they probably challenge existing perceptions and that's just the way it goes for the people involved so interestingly cassandra kind of maps pretty well back on to this um we're going to put aside for a second her thing is kind of magical you know she you're never going to believe her because she's cursed um but there are a number of things that if the curse piece wasn't there would still kind of get in her way as far as being heard and communicating these prophecies so first of all cassandra was an outsider to the community she had no business giving these kinds of prophecies she was not

a government leader she was not a religious leader she was a princess saying that troy was going to fall um next she suggested really drastic change and um i don't know about you but i would rather not believe if some crazy person came up to me and said that the world was going to end um it's just too drastic it's not approachable and then last um she's spoken riddles so even if you could get past the credibility piece the approachability piece of what she's saying she actually you couldn't understand what it was she was saying so when it comes to crossing this diamond i think that all of these things apply i think that it's a matter of

establishing credibility it's a matter of communicating with approachability and then clear communication in general so we're going to dig into each of these pieces to overcome our curse all right so for the credibility piece what was really interesting um about the work that i was doing we actually are fortunate at coinbase to have a dedicated research team and i'm sure for most of you um that may not be the case but what was really cool about this was that because i was a designer conducting this research on a team of four designers i had the credibility of the designers so when i would pass um a copy of this video over to the designers of these interviews

they're all excited about it i have the credibility with them to keep it going up the chain and then when all of the designers got really hyped about it then they passed it over to pm when pms got really hyped about it they passed it over to engineering and it was just this ongoing chain um and then the next piece i think again if you're a designer you probably know this or a researcher people don't really like qualitative data it doesn't you know make them feel comfortable i guess and so i've learned time and time again as i am communicating user research that it's important to always pair it with quantitative data our business people they only want to hear about statistics and data and click

rates and daily active users um but i want to tell them about this weirdo crypto guy that i've been talking to for the past hour who just showed me everything he loves about coinbase pro and how we can change it and it's important that they hear those things qualitative research is incredibly important um but again keeping in mind your audience and being able to communicate those things in light of quantitative data to give it that credibility um to be heard so that's the credibility piece next let's talk about approachability so again this harkens back to cassandra you can imagine her in the street yelling that troy is you know going down and it's just being totally insane and so far out there

um i have felt the same way at times you know this alarmist like you talk to a user and it's like oh what are we even doing we need to pivot the entire product we need to restart today like let's throw away all of our designs um but obviously that doesn't work and that's not approachable in any way for someone who is aligned with the business so again to to learn to mindfully communicate research findings that align with company's strategy and goals i think this is one that has always been a challenge for me but again and again i learned that it's how you can be heard when you're sharing these things another tool that we have used very closely is persona creation which is something

else that um you know at times people have not been super excited about they seem fluffy they seem again qualitative they seem inaccurate to some but what they've worked for us to do is that they've made the research approachable it's put it in a way where we can all get on the same page and understand what this research means it's not that it's competing with our data really it's just illustrating our data it's giving it um some lines and some color and it's giving us specificity and nuance when it comes to the app interface and so what we did um with the designers now on board they were all hype after the interviews we all like kind of secretly started

pushing them into these different meetings of cross-functional team members and we started to just like slowly socialize all of this research and it's a continual push of putting the research in front of people having the conversations of fighting about the name of the persona or the picture that we're using to represent the persona and getting everyone on the same page to alignment and so the last piece which probably encapsulates all this as well is clear communication and this is probably the hardest piece um and maybe it should actually say patient communication because i think that's the bigger work of the ux designer but what we ended up doing was conducting a number of workshops this was actually two weeks ago we did six workshops

throughout the week where we brought all of the research we brought the personas we brought everyone who was involved every stakeholder into a room and we argued for hours and it was great it was the best thing it was honestly the best thing we have done in a month and has anyone done the deep work uh workshop that's happening outside has anybody seen it at the booth okay there's an awesome thank you uh there's an awesome booth outside and they are kind of illustrating this design process this week and so if you take a look at their stuff they're pretty much going through this iterative process of um back to those diamonds like design exploration and then coming to a problem and then exploring the problem and then choosing

a solution um and so that's what we did in these workshops if anyone's interested in sort of the actual methodology of the workshops i have it like very well documented and i'm happy to give it to anyone who wants to hear about it um but the main second piece here is just be patient um i think if anything i've learned that it is worth giving everyone the time and space to actually explore the reach the research to give them an environment that almost mimics being part of the research um that might look like taking videos of user interviews and throwing them into random slack channels with people who wouldn't usually see them or inviting someone to do a user interview

with you but it's really a matter of letting them understand for themselves instead of sort of arguing from the high horse of ux and you know the high horse of business leader or whatever it is it's worth letting them go through the journey and so in real life and together right now we've crossed the diamond um we've gone from discovery and finally made it to definition and so i leave with you um you know the impartation to use your credibility to champion user research whether you're a designer in the room you're

someone doing business you are a researcher you're a developer whoever you are use what you've got to get user research into your product it will make it better period to empathize with the needs and goals of the company and make your insights approachable if you're suggesting crazy stuff nobody's going to do it and last be patient and doing the work of communicating honestly i think this is more work than even doing the research the work of communicating it was much harder than that but it ended up being totally worth it in the end um and i did also include for anybody who wants this this really great podcast that inspired this talk and um it's actually so it's also about

cassandra's curse but it's about the climate crisis and the way that um you know similarly those who are fighting for our climate um feel kind of cursed to not be heard in some areas of the world but with that that's it thank you guys [Applause] questions oh time oh here i'll give you my email address thank you a lot