The designer role in a startup
#hatchbyffadesignmonth #thefearlesscommunity

Lewis Kang'ethe Ngugi
Lewis Kang'ethe Ngugi
ngeshlew
@ngeshlew
https://lewisngugi.com
#thefearlesscommunity

Startups (design) in Africa
InvestBambooPaystack Helium Health

Startups today
How do you build
design in an
organisation that has
never had a design
team before, what
are the challenges
and what are the
hacks?
NEA's 2016 Future of
Design Survey
highlighted that the
key characteristics
of a ‘design-centric’
organization
1. Design integrated across multiple
areas
2. User-Centricity
3. Dedicated Design Team
4. Designers as part of C-Level or
Executive team
5. Founder who is a designer
6. Equal ratio of Designers to Engineers
By level of importance:
Source:
NEA: The Future of Design in Startups 2016
Survey Results

How do you build
design in an
organisation that has
never had a design
team before, what
are the challenges
and what are the
hacks?
NEA's 2017 Future of
Design survey, 95% of
all respondents
believe that designers
in technology startups
need to be involved
directly in the
business side.
What this tells us is that the role of design
in any organization today is changing
significantly. Designers now have greater
opportunities to influence the success or
failure of a business.
Design is becoming a key
differentiator for companies to
acquire funding, press coverage, and
loyal users.
Source:
Future of Design in Startups: Survey Results
2017
Design today

Design fails
1
2
Customer could abandon your website, the
numbers hover around 15–30% for a bad user
experience.
91% of people regularly or occasionally read online
reviews, and 84% trust online reviews as much as
a personal recommendation.
Low Search Engine Rankings
Negative Brand Perception
3 Website UX issues such as performance,
accessibility, mobile friendliness, page speed e.t.c
all constitute a huge component of ranking
factors.
Website Abandonment
4 Users will not think twice before abandoning a
product or app which causes them frustration.
Competitive Disadvantage
Startups fails
1 Tunnel vision and not gathering user
feedback are fatal flaws for most tech
startups.
Ignoring customers (9)
2 Knowing your target audience & knowing
how to get their attention & convert them
to leads & ultimately customers is most
important skills of a successful business.
Poor marketing (8)
3 Bad things happen when you ignore what
a users wants and need, whether
consciously or accidentally.
User unfriendly product (6)
4 While obsessing over the competition is
not healthy, ignoring them was also a
recipe for failure in 19% of the startup
failures.
Get outcompeted (4)
Source:
CBINSIGHTS: The Top 20 Reasons Startups
Fail
What's the problem here?

The 300 million dollar button
Spool worked on a major eCommerce site with a typical
login form as part of the checkout process. When users had
filled their shopping carts and were looking to pay, they
were presented with a simple form asking for email address
and password with buttons for login, register, and forgot
password.
First-time customers were hesitant to click “Register”
because they were afraid of marketing messaging and
entering personal information, despite not knowing what
registering would actually involve.
Spool found that 45% of all customers had multiple
registrations in the system, and there were 160,000
“Forgot Password” requests a day—75% of which did not
result in a subsequent purchase. All the team had to do
was replace the “Register” button and put a “Continue”
button with a disclaimer that creating an account was not
necessary to make a purchase. The number of customers
purchasing skyrocketed by 45%, resulting in $15 million the
first month.
Over the course of the year, that one tiny design change resulted in $300
million in new revenue. Even the tiniest-seeming elements of design can
have a huge trickle-down impact on profitability.
How did it work out?
Design from day one?

Dear
Designers...

Visual
Designer
Brand
Designer
Conversation
Designer
MarCom
Designer
Product
Designer
Leadership
You wear many hats and naturally become a multidisciplinary
designer
What does it mean to be a designer in a
startup?

Hacks to succeed as a designer?
Prioritize
You will get requests from everyone
Learn to say NO!
Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform
Design Decisions
Be a generalist
Become the everything designer if
you want to be a great startup
designer to fill needs as they arise
(broaden your design skills). You will
own the design for these big
projects from start to finish
Consistent User
Research & analytics
Capture behavioral data, the basis for
evidence-driven design decision. Sheds
light on what people actually do with a
product, which can be substantially
different from what they say they do
with it.
Create a design
process
Startup fails as they rush the product
to the market without proper research,
strategy, & testing.investing months in
production without thinking of
customer satisfaction. As a designer in
a startup, you have to move fast as well
by having a process.
View book View book View book View book

Hacks to succeed as a designer?
Communication
Asking the right questions & Always
have a why. Tim Brown, the CEO of
IDEO, says leaders may not have all
the answers, but need to ask the
right kinds of questions.
Knowledge
transfer
Document your processes and
deliverables. Document all decisions.
Network with
other designers
Attend meetups, conferences, AMA
and other networking sessions virtually.
Ask for what you
need
Nobody can read your mind. Not your
coworkers, not your friends, not your
partner, and especially not your boss.
It’s good to have a sounding board
before you talk to your boss, where a
mood swing might have larger
implications than it deserves.
View book View book Meetup View book

Hacks to succeed as a designer?
Prove ROI of your design work
Understand the
business acumen &
which metrics matter.
Startups trust results
they can measure
(preferably in dollars).
Saying that a design has
increased conversions by
200% is brilliant.
Attaching a number to
something makes
entrepreneurs (and, yes,
designers, too) feel better
about the problem being
addressed.
View book

I promise, it's true!
Greatest Hack of all time!

Dear
Founders...

Startups can use
Agencies
1. Branding
2. Marketing / creative
campaign design
3. Packaging design
4. Product design
Creative agency DesignStudio developed Airbnb’s new logo

If you are a Founder
Be involved
● In design decisions and support
design as a key pillar of the company.
● In regular design reviews
Build a diverse team
● Perspectives that are shaped by gender,
race, ethnicity, religion, culture and life
experiences
● Grew up in a rural vs urban vs suburban
area, associates vs bachelors, etc
Designers switch jobs
● Concerned about lack of career
growth
● Leadership team didn't understand
value of design
Hire the right designers
● Entrepreneurial: resourceful and
willing to experiment
● Curious, motivated, and humble
● Natural leaders

Everyone is a
designer
- Tim Brown: "Design is everywhere, inevitably everyone is a designer"
- Don Norman: "We are all designers. We manipulate the environment, the
better to serve our needs. We select what items to own, which to have
around us. We build, buy, arrange and restructure: all this is a form of
design."
- Daniel Burka: "Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not,
people outside of your design team are making significant design choices
that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your
product. They are designers."

Useful links
Community sign up page:
fearlesstalent.co/community
MBA for designers
d.mba/
5 steps to a hypothesis-driven design process
invisionapp.com/inside-design/hypothesis-driven-design-process/
Pick tools wisely
userinterviews.com/blog/ux-research-tools-map-2020
UX Coffee Hours
storage.googleapis.com/uxcoffeehours.com/site/index.html
Amazing Design People List
https://www.adplist.org/mentors
Other books
Practice Product Design Skills
productdesigninterview.com/
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're
Wrong About the World--and Why
Things Are Better Than You Think
amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-W
orld-Things-Better/

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