Design is commonly referred to physical objects, or big format advertisement, but in our daily basis we don’t realize that design lives in our common activities, for this specific case, digital activities.

 

For this post I’m referring to a great TED Talk I recently watched (link to the video posted below) involving Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, an expert in this matter who has worked for big companies such as Google, YouTube and Facebook.

 

Designing digital experiences is not easy, as there are various elements that are involved in it. In the first place, you should consider two core elements, audacity and humility. Audacity means to think in a really big scale since millions of people are going to interact with your designs day after day, with billions of views and clicks. For humility; you need to remember that it’s not about you, but the people who are going to use your interfaces, basically designing for humanity.

 

After this premise, let’s get deeper into points that will make the difference when working in a big design project.

 

Design at scale

“Little things really matter”, for example, the famous Facebook “Like” button got redesigned because it was not moving along with the evolution of the whole brand, so the design team needed to be very careful with the use of colors, different languages, gradients, size, etc. Actually, the person who designed it took about 280 hours of his time to do it. So, why should you spend so much time in such a small thing as a button? Because when designing at scale, there is not such thing as little, the “Like” button is used 22 billion times a day!

 

Design with data

Facebook had a problem in which people started erroneously reporting photos as abuse. After analyzing this issue, the team realized that most of the cases were from people requesting to remove a picture of themselves that they did not like. As a first solution, Facebook came up with this option in which you could “ask” your friend to remove the photo, but only 20% of the people actually used this new feature. After further analysis, the team redesigned it in several steps; first, after clicking the “report” button, a question box would display saying: why do you want to get this photo removed? And some answers to choose such as “I’m in the photo and I don’t like it” would follow. After it, you would receive a next box asking: why didn’t you like the photo? And some answers such as, “It is embarrassing” would display. In the end, a new box would come up so you could write any personal comments. With this simple change, 60% of people are using now this feature as the problem relied on human empathy and the need of people to express how they feel. Of course data and analytics are not substitutes for design intuition, so it is always good to combine both aspects.

 

Manage change carefully

People can easily become efficient using a bad design proposed by a company, and when organizations make these efforts to better what they already have, people can become angry; especially in social networks where you are dealing with people’s content, and they are used to claim ownership. YouTube used to have a “five star rating” for user’s videos, but most people only used the 5 star rating, a smaller group rated 1 star, and nobody used 2, 3 or 4 stars. After carefully analyzing this issue, the team came up with the idea of switching from the star rating to a “thumbs up / thumbs down” rating, which of course caused impact in loyal users to the stars, but in the end the change was done the right way. Of course there are a lot of implications involved, but this gets me thinking that Facebook could implement a “thumbs down” button for Facebook, some people would find it to be very handy! 🙂

 

Know whom you are designing for

When designing for the entire human race, you can probably run into the bubble where you live in, and this means that what you live in a daily basis, is not what the others are experiencing, neither what they need. To overcome this problem, you need to travel and understand your final user, use your app and website in other languages to make them intuitive, don’t stick to high-end phones because everything is going to look better, and the most important thing, talk with your real target in a deeper way so you get to their real needs and feelings.

 

Here the importance of design in this 2.0 era, in which Internet is not a modern topic within society anymore, but a daily basis tool that we carry around with us everyday in our pockets, and connects us to the world in a way we could have never imagined. Finally, let’s remember this: Be audacious and humble to deliver an excellent design for millions of people, then think big so every small detail is perfect as internet receives billions of views a day, always consider data as an important tool to optimize your designs, be careful with small and major changes through your websites and apps since a minimal change wrongly done can make your target unhappy, and be customer centric, know your target and pay extreme attention to their needs and feelings, this would make a big difference.

 

Irving Espinosa

 

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