Tom Petty, Head of UX at GoCardless at 383's Byte Breakfast talking about employing the right design principles and how they influence everyday decisions.

1. @tp
Byte
28th January 2016
www.383project.com
Decisions, Decisions:
Designing products with
a point of view.

4. AVOIDING
IDENTITY CRISIS

5. - You do this by celebrating tough decisions and trade-offs, and their consequences, rather than
smoothing them away
- This is important because it will give your product a clear identity, meaning users will
know if it’s for them or not, what to do with it, and how they should use it
- I’m going to go through a few things we’ve tried to achieve this at GoCardless
- In the process I’ll show you some really shitty work that thankfully never made the cut

7. - GoCardless make recurring payments software
- Process $1bn every year…

8. - For companies like TripAdvisor, Box.com, The Guardian, The FT, The DVLA

9. - We started with a small business offering
- Ideal for small subscription businesses, like gyms

10. - But wanted to move into serving larger organisations
- So we kept our small business product, and built something for enterprises
- We soon discovered there was a huge gap between the two

11. - Everyone falls into into the middle
- These are accountants, agencies, start-ups — any business that grows when they’re with us

12. - We’re now focused on a product to bridge that gap
- Something that will work for everyone

13. - ‘Something for everyone’ is a red flag as a designer
- How on earth can you do that?
- And how can you do it whilst avoiding an identity crisis?
- I’m going to show you how we’re exploring this challenge
- Hopefully some of it will be useful for you, too

14. - Trying to build something for everyone leads to something for no one.
- There are plenty of examples of this happening elsewhere

15. - We’ve done the same thing

16. - This is an early attempt at something for small and large businesses
- Ignore the shitty UI
- It’s the content that worries me

21. - Thousands of tiny decisions and trade-offs
- Celebrate the fact you’re not pleasing everyone
- Trust, that they will thank you for it in the long-run
- They won’t thank you for the opposite

22. - you need to know what it’s not as well as what it is
- because if you don’t…

23. - You’ll end up building something for no one

24. - Beg stole and borrowed processes and best practices from some awesome people
- I used to work for an agency where I learned a lot about designing with purpose in mind
- Three things we do to inject a point of view and opinion into our work, hopefully some of them are useful to you

28. - If you want to create something for a diverse group of people, you need to know who they are
- vegetable boxes to box.com
- So we dug in to our merchant base to find out what jobs they hire us to do…

29. - Merchants range from 1 person…

30. - …to 100,000

31. - Our competitors are everything from custom banking integrations…

32. - … to cash in hand
- So, what questions do they ask of your product?
- What jobs do they hire us to do?

33. - Small businesses hire us to…
- Improve their cashflow
- Teach them about their business
- Reduce hassle

34. - Professional services hire us to…
- Improve cashflow
- Save admin time
- Work for their clients, too

35. - Large enterprises hire us to…
- Reduce payment failures
- Automate the process
- White label everything

36. - What unites everyone?
- Who should you give most attention to?

37. - So once we know what our users ask of us, we can create something to respond to
- ‘Provocations’ (or ‘questions’) are what start us down the road of injecting a point of view

38. - The unit of building a product is the project

39. - This is controlled by ‘The Roadmap’
- An all powerful presence in the organisation

40. - Roadmaps are just a list of shit to do

41. - Usually discreet projects
- ‘Password reset’, or ‘settings’
- Put it all together and you probably have a product…

42. - But it can end up like homer’s unfinished robot
- just desperate for legs
- A seemingly random collection of features
- we wanted a roadmap of questions, not answers

43. - Things that map directly to the needs of our users
- We want to answer the questions they ask of our product
- Borrowed the format from IDEO, used to use it at Wolff Olins for big brand transformations.
- Works well for small projects too

44. - Hopefully it will lead to a product designed to meet the exact needs of its users

45. - I know, I know
- We know that getting something built is all about making decisions & having a point of view
- As a design team, we use principles framed as choices to help us make good design decisions
- You all know about design principles

46. - It started with Deiter Rams’ 10 principles of good design
- Good design is honest, inevitable, long-lasting etc.

47. - GDS bought them online with their awesome design principles
- We wanted to have a go
- We started really badly

48. - This stuff is hygiene, it’s the baseline for a product
- It needs to be a point of view, meaning you should be able to disagree with it, just like in real life

49. - The reverse needs to be a valid strategy / opinion
- You need to consciously inject that point of view to bring it to life
- We choose something over something else

50. Here’s an example

52. - Some may disagree with it, but that’s exactly the point

53. - The decisions you make should be real decisions
- ‘Keep it simple’ isn’t a decision
- After lots of debate, here’s what we settled on

57. - This is an example of the gnarly stuff
- we might have annoyed payments pros and developers
- It’s not looking them directly in the eye

58. - All the time someone is using us, they’re not running their business
- We’ll design to prioritise the things that require our users' immediate attention — the rest can wait
- Not surprising, but the total opposite strategy to something like a social site
- I’d like a measure of success to be how short the average session length is

59. - GoCardless is designed to solve one problem really, really well. We could be great at other things, but we’ll design to ensure that we’re the be
- Only examples are things we’ve NOT done: invoicing, analytics, e-commerce, loans, becoming a bank
- we might have annoyed x million potential customers

60. - We’ve gone through this strange ‘point of view’ process, here’s an example to bring it to life

61. - Going back to small businesses…

62. - We’ve got a good understanding of their needs

63. - Let’s focus on how we might reduce hassle for small businesses

64. - This is the provocation / question on our roadmap
- One way of answering that is improving the time it takes to sign up and get started
- Which previously was very long

65. - Our old sign up form had 18 fields
- We needed — and still need — them all for regulatory reasons
- But we can delay when we ask for that info…

66. - and get it down to 5
- it means you can be taking payments in 30 seconds
- this might annoy pro users with all the info to hand
- but it helps small businesses. and we choose small users over all users

67. - We’ve seen how we’re trying to inject a point of view into the design of GoCardless
- and I guess we can apply some of this to the restaurant at the end of my road, the tapas / indian / coffee / club fusion I mentioned
- Perhaps they could adopt some design principles.
- I had a think of some on the train on the way up
- The best I could come up with were ‘tapas over terrible coffee’ or ‘curry over clubnights’
- At least that might help them with their identity crisis

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