If you’re a designer that’s been in the industry for at least a couple of years, you might have come across opportunities to work in startups yourself. Startups sound amazing if you’re a designer; fast-paced, omnichannel collaborative, and broadly dynamic in decision making. Fast-paced also means that you might get opportunities to grow, and as a designer, that’s one thing most of us aim for.
Amazingly, I have had the opportunity to work with my fair share of startups, and I’m here to share my experience, as well as the experience of others, who were for the most part, in the same boat as me.
In the past few months, I was approached by some people for different freelance projects, and oddly enough, all of them were startups. I make it a point to hear from the client first; what their visions, goals and success triggers may be, and to narrow them down I’ve usually followed The Futur’s advice:
1. Define the Goal
2. Diagnose the Problem
3. Narrow your Design Exploration
4. Sales pitch
After speaking with them, I found several key takeaways that led me to write this article and share my experience of what you, as a designer may face in a startup (Please note that this is not applicable to all startups):
Unclear Goals Galore
The market adapts rapidly to new technology, almost a bit too fast, so startup employees experience professional burnouts quicker than others. Most of this could be directed at the ever-changing goal, because most companies being Agile, they are always gunning for adapting to changes in the industry; whether be it in the actual product, customer acquisition, or marketing practices. In my personal experience, Agile environments in startups are even more fast-paced, acquire ridiculously narrow deadlines, and offer little to no room for error. Since the market is constantly changing, the startup goals (be it long-term or short-term) change rapidly, often leaving employees confused, and more often than not, the never-ending play of catch-up becomes emotionally, physically and mentally stressful.
Though, it’s not just agile. The Room mentions, “Most clients don’t know how exactly should their startup look like, so here you need to turn your professionalism on maximum and create your own visual system.” This was inclusive of the clients I spoke with; some of them did not know what they wanted to do with their product, let alone who to market it to.
There are a few questions I always ask prospective clients before we proceed further on the project:
1. What is the scope of the project?
Example: Narrow Scope Project being revamping/creating one module of the product and Broad Scope being revamping the entire digital product
2. What industry does it belong to?
Example: Media, Information Technology, SaaS, E-Commerce
3. What is the team size I am going to work with?
Example: Solo versus a guided team effort
4. What is the goal of the project?
Example: Is it to drive sales to the product, is it to showcase the product, etc.
5. Who are the key partners of the project?
Example: If you want to sell home-baked goods, then locally renowned home-chefs would be a key partner
6. Who is the end user? Are the end users and the customers the same?
In several cases, the end user is different from the customer. So, you would need to define who to market it to.
7. By when would you require the final prototype?
Defining deadlines is important, you should know your own scope of handling pressure.
And finally,
8. How would you describe the project as a success?
What are the key triggers/metrics that make this project a success?
Answering all these questions helps you define how you would align your responsibilities in the project and take it forward.
Oh My Fur and Whiskers, I’m Late!
Playing catch-up with the market is a very time-consuming activity, in fact, it usually takes up all of your time, whether you are a marketing professional, a UX guru, or even a CEO of the startup. What does this not leave time for? Actual user research. User research is often thinned down to its barest of threads: Number of Errors, Sales Figures and Engagement. Oksana Ivanova mentions,” Even if you are a part of a design team, you will have plenty of tasks that you will just not be able to grasp all alone. UX is complicated, and requires effort from all team members in all teams and departments and supported by the organizational culture.”
A personal experience comes to mind: I was in an extremely high-paced startup culture, where driving sales was the ultimate goal of the organization. When it came to design, I was able to deliver assets on requirement and not skip out on deadlines. But then it occurred to me, “What value are my designs creating? Are they contributing towards brand loyalty? Are they leaving an impression on my users?” I required marketing-relevant figures (user demographics/persona interactions etc.), but all I was provided was sales figures, which made no sense to me as a designer. Sales on a particular design asset can be due to a number of reasons, inclusive of but not limited to the design, and this lack of metrics made me create designs aimlessly for months. By the time you actually get to practice UI/UX with researched figures, the practices, numbers and behaviors may have changed again.
Interactions and Relationships
NNGroup: Interaction-level experience is what is commonly understood as the focus of UX and is concerned with designing the experience of a single interaction that a user has with a company to perform a task. At the relationship level, we focus on the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and his cumulative impression as a patron of that organization.
Since startups are new to the industry, all journeys mapped become subject to interaction level, whether be it signing up for an email subscription, or purchasing a product from the company; it’s all first impressions. And, since startups are in competition with industry giants, there is minimal room for error. So, what is a startup to do? They usually end up focusing on either interaction or journey level UX, and lay off focus on the relationship level UX, which may cost them the hard-earned customers in the long run.
These Jeans are Too Tight
Defining deadlines is very important; though with startups, deadlines can be quite blurry. They may shift in priority upon actualization, and your effort may be left in vain: a similar case happened to me. I had spent weeks researching user login via phone number and found several flaws in the system, developed multiple iterations, including several high-fidelity prototypes. As I finished designing the user journey for the same, the priority of this project changed, and we suddenly had to design new web pages for an ongoing sale for Christmas. This shifting flurry of deadlines in startups often kills the intrinsic motivation you started your current project with, as you are unable to receive the satisfaction of surpassing or conquering the problem you had at hand.
All that set aside, Startups do provide multiple opportunities to learn as they operate on High-Risk High Reward methodologies. They come with several opportunities to observe, adapt and learn from different departments as the hierarchy tends to be transparent, your peers are collaborative and enthusiastic.
But are they for you?
The “questions to your client” mentioned above may provide clarity. Once you have the answers to all the questions mentioned above, it is time for a self-interrogation. In my case, I usually ask myself:
1. Is this a project I am familiar with?
2. Do I need to learn more things in order to successfully complete this project?
3. Does the deadline seem feasible?
And finally,
4. Does this project interest me?
Keep in mind, these questions are not startup-oriented. You can use these questions for any new project you may have at hand.
I personally recommend working for startups, learning your share from them yourself and build experience, because in a startup: you can make change and see the results in real-time.
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