- Building and growing a design team in a competitive market
- An alternate path to great design by marrying collaboration and critique.
- Transparency vs debate. You may not need a seat at the table.
- Lowell Goss, Head of Design & UX, Reddit
Thank you to UXDX for inviting me. Reddit is not exactly synonymous with UX. I’ve heard it described as “old school”, Craigslist-like and nostalgic. I’m pretty sure these were folks trying to be nice. The truth is that Reddit is hard to use, hard to understand and not very attractive.
Despite being a 15 yo company UX design and research have been absent through most of the company’s history. My understanding is that UX at Reddit started 3 years ago when my predecessor established a team and launched the first redesign in the company’s history. It was a huge step forward that’s had huge impact on the company.
I’m pretty new to Reddit. My one year anniversary is in about 3 weeks. Reddit is the 11th UX team that I’ve built and led since starting my career about 25 years ago. Over that time I’ve made lots of mistakes, but also learned some things that seem to work while leading teams at Frog Design, Amazon, Yahoo! And more.
Today I want to talk about 4 things
Building team
Collaboration vs Critique
Create More, Talk Less
Making, Inventing Dreaming
Let’s start by talking about people
~50%+ of my time is spent on recruiting
Name, photo, resume
Reasons to say yes
Under valued talent
Smarts, Talent, Drive
Story
About Reddit
Questions
Most interview systems are designed like a videogame (little boss, medium boss, big boss)
Build the role around the person
Analysis - breakdown the problem
Synthesis - creative ideas
System Thinking - impacts and possible consequences, pre-mortem
Empathy - understanding the world from others’ POV
Level playing field. Same question, same amount of time
What are we looking for? Yes and...
So where do people stumble? - constraints, research, valuing their own life experience, observing the world
All design team
Storytelling
Narrowing
Narrowing
Iteration helps us to quickly and predictably reach local maximums
This should be fun
Improvisation
Yes and...
Creating lateral options in parallel at key stages helps us to reset the S curve and push toward global maximums
Orange flavor
Orange color
Cup or cone
Sprinkles
Sherbert, sorbet, dairy-free
Carrot or mango or peach
Specs and requirements and meetings and brainstorms are hollow descriptions of what you’re making. Whether you’re testing with users, collaborating with colleagues or (most especially) presenting to executives...
Bi-directional communication
Weekly email + deck
Wall
Slack
All hands
Design operations, delivery, and production
Moving from spec to problem and back again
You can't get there from here. Anti-optimization.
Efficiency, Process, Just in time
Kaizen
Agile
Iteration
Local maximum
Problem solving
User research
Vision
Illustrating the collective dream of what’s possible and desirable