Designing a Digital Product at a Startup

Talk at the Tech Startup Day in Brussels — a story and tips about how we design a digital product at Darwin Analytics (SAAS startup).

Transcript

1. Darwin Analytics Evolve faster.
2. Darwin Analytics is a young SAAS startup.
3. We provide a tool, to prove & improve your content marketing.
4. Designing a digital product.
5. Design is not “making it pretty”.
6. Design is how it works, what it looks like & what it feels like. (Steve Jobs said that)
7. Design is a team effort.
9. Involve the whole team in your brainstorms — to get valuable insights from all sides.
11. To flex our brainstorm muscles, and to avoid obvious ideas, we do something silly — like picturing our product for fictional characters.
13. Discuss what’s important and what’s not, to align goals and priorities.
14. Design is not perfect.
15. It’s hard to show people unfinished, ugly things. Do it anyway. Get early feedback, on everything.
17. Focus, by writing a feature spec.
20. Write personas for your feature spec, based on real people to build valuable features.
21. Describe what the feature will do.
22. Describe what the feature will not do (and prevent feature creep!)
23. Make ugly mockups. Show them to everyone. Get early feedback.
24. Measure — set your expectations and measure the outcome to learn more.
25. Ship it and get more feedback.
27. This is Big Bertha. She’s a huge excel sheet, tracking every mistake. And she won’t forget! She keeps you from getting used to the imperfections in your product.
28. Design involves your clients.
30. Get a CAB (customer advisory board) to get valuable feedback and ideas.
32. Do user tests, card sorting, interviews, ... To get a better understanding of your client.
33. It’s okay to feel ashamed. We learned so much out of these sessions...
34. Having a cab is wonderful. Feedback. Ideas. Motivation!
36. Thank them whenever you can, with whatever you have. Even if it’s just pizza.
37. Iterate as much as you can. You will get better at it, and find your own way.
38. Thank you @darwinanalytics @choisissez