Triton

Thoughts on product, growth and other things

If you ask enough companies about some of the internal tools they've built that they can't function without, there's bound to be a billion dollar idea in there somewhere.

This also applies to the processes companies follow. But the hard part will be to create something out of it that you can sell. You can preach processes but to package and sell them is tricky.

A good designer uses conventional wisdom and affordances to make things simple and easy to understand.

A great designer understands the challenges his/her users are going to face and adapts.

When we start new work, we think we should Step 1: Find the right tools Step 2: Do the work

Whereas we actually should Step 1: Start doing the work Step 2: Improve the tools

When I wanted to start writing some years back, I started researching about whether it made more sense to create a blog or to write on Medium, what should the domain name be, what kind of writing should I do etc. Needless to say, I never got down to putting 100 words together.

Last year all these ideas were building up in my head and I just wanted to let them out so I could stop thinking about them. So I started writing them on paper. Sometimes I didn't have a paper at hand, so I started writing on my notes app. My writing improved, so did my tooling. I still only have a shitty blog that nobody reads but I'm becoming a writer. You can too if you start doing it.

Cons – Twitter has different kind of content than Instagram – Source attribution can be a legally grey area – There are plenty of generators which either focus on selecting background images for text or customising the text itself, both on web and mobile apps – Regular people are happy posting screenshots of tweets

Pros – Quotes and Tweet screenshots are pretty popular on Instagram – There ought to be some overlap of topics which work well on both platforms – Some brands survive on just putting up text based on a single template – Text to Image is not trivial to do for normal people – This might be scalable to other platforms, both for source and destination

Things I need in my blogging setup

  • Easy to start writing
  • No distractions, no frills while writing. The editor should be as simple as possible.
  • Publishing a blog post should be one click after writing some stuff down.
  • Everything is a draft. I should be able to edit published posts with one click.
  • Since I write short posts, the whole post should be visible on the homepage.
  • Should be able to write on mobile. Writing inspiration can strike anytime.

When you take away all the unnecessary things, what you're left with becomes stronger than what you started with.

Example 1 – If you take away the useless words in your article, your writing will be more concentrated and impactful. Give up phrases like “sometimes”, “I guess”, “I personally think...” etc.

Example 2 – If you take away all the unfulfilling activities in your life, you'll be more happy with the things that you actually do.

When you're trying to improve something, think about what can you take away from it.

When you do not have any real-life designing experience and you're trying to get a job, there are 3 parts 1. Practise the craft 2. Apply the practice 3. Show and tell both the Practice and Application

New designers tend to do all the 3 things in the same project. While point 3 can be done independently, it's unlikely that you can practise and apply things in the same project.

For a practice project, the point is to do it multiple times, hopefully with better and better results. Therefore, smaller projects make more sense. Fill your Dribbble with a hundred shots. Do a hundred hour-long user research exercises for random existing products. Do hundred unsolicited redesign projects.

You're learning to think in a particular way.

Now that you've practiced your craft, you should try to find real-life applications. This is where unsolicited work, redesigns, etc would not be as much help. You want to reach out to people who badly need designers but can't find them or can't afford them. Talk to your favourite coffee place and see if he wants a logo. Get in touch with the creator of an open-source project with some users and see if they want a facelift. Ping a just-launched startup and ask them if they'd like you to do some user research.

This is where you'd get your validation. Turns out the coffee place has a different design aesthetic and you need to learn how to take that into consideration. Turns out the open source project doesn't have resources to develop the shiny redesign you did and you need to learn to work under constraints. Turns out it's easier to do user research than to convince the startup the need to act on the results.

This is when to you learn how to deal with real-life problems, not just design problems. You need both to succeed as a designer.

Don't forget to document all of this, you'd still need a portfolio.

There are two ways to grow a community. The first one if what most people naturally do. To grow the numbers. If there are enough people in the community, there will be enough people with problems and enough people to provide solutions. The problem is that without any external force, it is difficult to grow communities to such sizes. If you do not have a hungry market or sponsorship or a big brand name, you'd find it difficult to form self sustaining communities.

There is another approach. Grow the community organically, seeding it with a few people. The general variance (in terms of skill, intellect, etc.) should be low, people should be able to see eye to eye. Find people who can be as active as you and get involved with them. Rely solely on the quality of communication. Ensure that these people form a respect for each other as well as for the community. If they do, they will invite people on their own, without needing encouragement from you. They will make sure that the people they invite have the same respect and enthusiasm for the community. It might take some time, but this will become a self fulfilling flywheel.

In the end, what matters more, having 10 active people in a community of 1000 or 100 active members in a community of 100?

What is the problem in thing X? How would a designer answer this? If you only scratches the surface, you'd say something like

“X is 80px in height and the design specified it to be 72px”

While this critique is very actionable, this does not offer you insights into the general things that make development smoother in future. You can go one step deeper and ask why -

“X had extra padding than the design”

Now this is slightly better. It's still actionable (remove padding from X), but also gives you some insight into what went wrong. Maybe it would be better to define paddings better in the design specification. Let's try to go even deeper.

“The CSS structure of X could not be accurately mapped to the design specifications”

Now we know that the culprit might be that the translation between the design system and CSS is not clear. This is still actionable at your level. This is the level where processes are created or tweaked. You can change how the design system clearly define things like padding. You can keep asking “Why” -

“Box models in CSS work behave completely differently than what design tools specify”

Now you've reached the level where ideas are born. You create small tools to help you do your job.

“CSS is based on different data models and abstractions than design tools and there is no clear translation layer”

This is when you wage war at products available in the market. You create your own product to solve this class of problems. This can be used not just by you, but by others as well.

“Designing should have a better correlation to development technologies “

This is not just about a product now. This is about a change in thinking, a change in how the world works. Your product is the thought leader in this field. More products emerge which enable this line of thought.

Soon, you're not even asking why. You have your hands and heads full of things and you keep riding with the wave. It is out of your hands and before you know it, it takes a life of its own. It becomes commonplace. The world accepts it. It molds it. Soon, it will be forgotten. It will be analysed and studied in books and research projects, to make way for new things.

Go as deep as you need to go, do not go deeper. You'll forget why you started.

Every time someone says, “Make a product for yourself”, I can't stop thinking about all those dead startup ideas where the maker was the only person who ended up using your product. It's not bad advice because this idea may be bad, it's bad advice because this gives the founder a false sense of validation.

I would rather say “Find people who are different from you but are hungry for a solution”. If you don't know them but you are still have an idea, you'll want to talk to them and find out as much as you can. For example, if I was making a product for chefs, I would try to talk to as many chefs as possible. But if I'm a developer and I'm making a product for developers, I would answer all questions with my experience and never bother to get more insights.