Week 4 of FRV’s Women Founders’ Project 2021
Product Design & Launch.
Written by Alexia Lee, D&I @ FRV & Tim Samson, Founder Support @ FRV.
The Women Founders’ Project (WFP) by Front Row Ventures is an 8-week pre-accelerator program aimed at supporting female-identifying founders in their paths to entrepreneurship. During the months of June and July, the program consists of a series of virtual workshops on the foundations of founderhood, individual coaching and one-on-one mentorship to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and provide networks of support and collaboration among first-time and experienced women entrepreneurs in the growing tech space.
📌 For more information on this year’s programming and schedule, check out this blog post announcing the third iteration of the Women Founders’ Project.
📌 For more information on this year’s cohort, check out this blog post announcing the third Women Founders’ Project cohort.
This is part 4 of 8 of our WFP 2021 blog series. Click here to read part 3.
Product Design with Alexandrine Allard
Following the session on how to evaluate their market and the concept of product-market fit in last week’s workshop with Isaac Souweine, our founders sat down with Alexandrine Allard, Senior Product Designer at Zendesk, to learn about the impact of design on a product’s success and how to approach design while prioritizing users.
The Importance of Good Design
Part of the success associated with the problem your product is trying to solve is the compatibility between your product’s design and its intended audience. Despite how effective your product is at solving a problem, a poorly designed product can reduce its efficiency and dilute the overall brand. To guarantee a user-friendly design, Alexandrine discussed the following with our founders:
- Listen to your audience — Your design should always prioritize user needs.
- Invest in research early — Conducting user research is an invaluable process that should be started as soon as possible in order to realize cost savings later on.
- Trends are not user needs — Just because a design is being used frequently in the space does not mean it is the right one for your product and users’ needs.
- Content is KEY— What you are presenting and how you are presenting it must be done in a way that provides value.
- Avoid dark patterns — Dark patterns are traps used in a product’s design intended to trick users into doing (or preventing them from doing) something. An example of this is the difficulty that users face when attempting to delete a social media account, as they are required to follow a long list of steps to complete the action. The social media platform designed this arduous process because they want you to remain an active user. Relying on a dark pattern for the success of your product is not sustainable long-term should a competitor come along with an equally effective solution and better design.
Design Principles & The Design Process
To achieve uniformity across your company’s design approaches, it is often good to establish some design principles. These are a set of considerations and questions that guide your team towards making appropriate design decisions.
Once design principles are set, the design process can begin. Guided by Design Thinking processes, it takes form in the following steps:
- Empathize = Research — Gather feedback and observations that seek to explain what the users experience, how they think, and feel what they endure throughout the process at hand.
- Define = Observation & Prioritization — Use the data gathered in Step 1 to draw parallels between various segments. Are there common pain points that users are experiencing?
- Ideate = Brainstorm — Designate a time and space for your team to bring forth ideas that address the unmet user needs previously identified. Bring these ideas together for the team to build on, without limitations.
- Prototype = Visualize — Assess which ideas stick and bring them to life visually using real, tactile representations. Internal feedback should be sought out and iterations of the prototype should be made accordingly.
- Test = Ask users again — With the changes that have been made, return to those same users to validate the improvements made. Continue to put your prototype in front of real customers from various segments to verify it achieves your product goals.
- Implement = Ship! — While it is often a forgotten step, this is the most important part of the design thinking process. Communicate the official launch of the design with the target users.
User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI)
The design process considers two complementary concepts that are important to understand and differentiate. When talking about user experience (UX), this refers to conducting user research, understanding how they feel, and defining their needs. Various UX tools that Alexandrine covered include:
- Persona: A fictional, yet realistic representation of your target user profiles. These archetypes make users memorable for you and your team.
- Journey Map: Journey maps help to visualize the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal using a timeline with accompanying actions.
- Empathy Mapping: These help to visualize user attitudes and behaviours, such as what they say, think, do, and feel. It assists in aligning your team with a deeper understanding of the end users, and reveals holes in existing user data.
- Storyboards: These help to visualize UX ideas through images displayed in a sequence of panels that chronologically map a story’s main events.
As for user interface (UI), this refers to all aspects involving the ideation, visualization, and prototyping of the product.
Key Takeaways
From the design principles that are set, to the execution of the design process and application of UX/UI software, you must remember that the goal is making your product usable by your target users and that doing so is impossible without understanding them.
Our Speaker
Alexandrine Allard, Senior Product Designer @ Zendesk
Alexandrine has been in product design for 9 years. At work, she transforms research insights into functional interfaces for targeted audiences. With deep interests in behavioural psychology, design, and people, she believes great product design is about human relationships and complexity communicated with simplicity — she sees the real value of her work in crafting designs that tell a story and fulfill human emotional needs. Outside of work, she spends her spare time running, hiking, climbing, reading, cooking with friends and petting dogs. She currently works as a Senior Product Designer at Zendesk and resides in Montreal, Canada.
Connect with Alexandrine:
Thank you Alexandrine for your time and insight on product design!
The Coming Weeks
Next week, Katy Yam, General Manager of FounderFuel, Real Ventures, will be discussing pitching and storytelling with the WFP 2021 cohort founders. The founders will also be meeting with FRV’s Founder Support Team to get feedback on their pitch decks.
If you have any questions or comments please feel free to send us an email at foundersupport@frontrow.vc. And make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to stay updated!
