For the past month, I’d been working on creating the new onboarding experience for Canonic, a low-code backend development tool that launched out of beta the day I published this article. While the process has been expanded upon in this case study, this particular article is meant to document my experience of seeing what lies beyond the process of making, in the realm of digital product design. A journey that remained foreign to me for three years in my academic cocoon at IIAD, Delhi.
Throughout my academic experience, we were exposed to textbook UI/UX processes; right up till prototyping. This ensured that we had solid foundational knowledge and embraced an empathetic process that resulted in a working prototype. But this was all that we’d done. These prototypes marked the end of a User-Experience Design project at IIAD. What happened after making a prototype remained a mystery. Quite comfortably, I reached the stage of a working prototype for the new onboarding in a little less than a week. The remaining parts of the month were steps that I had never experienced before.
#1: Collaborating with engineers.
The first new step was collaborating with an engineer. I was fortunate to have been working with Pratham, one of the co-founders of Canonic and a highly skilled developer, who understood what I was trying to create and the subsequent value that it could bring to the platform. Therefore, I never had to back away from the aspirational modular system that we were trying to build; even though the theory for it was still a little abstract. Pratham was confident that he’d be able to figure it out from an engineering perspective and I was confident from whatever little knowledge I’d built up by creating a modular user-flow structure.
This collaboration was, therefore, extremely active involving plenty of communication between engineering and design that resulted in a seamless transition from prototype to production. I’m sure that this experience was far too good and easy for me. There’ll be times when ideas will be limited by engineering feasibility and it is a factor that all young digital product designers should learn to accommodate for. This can only arise out of empathy; once designers know what it takes on the other side.
Academic design environments that have a UI/UX program, such as my own, choose to stay immune to this fact and see digital product design in isolation. At some stage, designers are bound to feel helpless as the outcomes differ from what they had originally envisioned; simply because they’ve never been been taught what it takes to bring their ideas to life. These flawed perspectives have led us to believe that design and engineering can exist as separate entities, albeit this can never be the case in the real world.
I’ve come to realise that design can never exist in isolation. It works in sync with so many other fields and I wish I’d known this earlier — Aditi Jain, co-founder at Canonic.
#2: Testing and validation.
The next new learning for me lied in testing, both internal and with external users. We used a combination of our networks and a platform called UserTesting to test the new onboarding. It was quite an experience to validate my assumptions and also, at times, face the fact that something I may have designed as a delightful experience may become a pain point for the larger audience.
This happens because the sheer act of making usually takes place in isolation. Sure, you collect insights before you start making your prototype but it’s impossible to validate every little element as they’re being made. This is why one does testing: to get user data and iterate. It’s a continuous, seemingly never-ending process. Fortunately, in this experience, things worked out in our favour. The feedback was largely positive and some inevitably made room for enhancements.
#3 There will never be a last, final, perfect change to set everything right.
The final experience that I’d like to address was the launch on ProductHunt. I remember staying up the entire night in the office identifying bugs and pestering the team to fix them.
I wanted to iron-clad the onboarding experience and ensure that it resulted in a largely positive experience for users. At this moment, Aditi & Simranjot reinforced how never-ending a process iterative design really is.
Post our launch, we’re going to get a bunch of new data from new users and a whole lot more to work up from. We’re going to find places to improve on, steps that’ll cease to be a part of future releases; heck, maybe even a complete redesign is what it’ll come down to after a few months. But that is what it is. Design is a continuous process, always demanding change. If you think you’ve got it right, you’re wrong and this marks the end of innovation on your product.
As Olga Tokarczuk wrote in her novel, Flights, “a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn into ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”
