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Welcome to Product Design Reference. Find the right UX methods and activities to use during Discovery, Ideation, and Testing, as well as resources and definitions of essential terms
Product Design Reference aims to help both designers and non-designers in navigating the extensive array of information relating to UX methods, activities, and terminology. For the sake of simplicity, these methods and activities are grouped into three sections, which are derived from an eight-phase UX design process.
Built and maintained by Tony O'Donohoe, a product designer and manager with over 20 years’ experience designing award-winning online products and leading high-output design teams.
Methods & Activities
🔍pageDiscovery💡pageIdeation🎯pageTestingLaws & Principles
⚖️pageLaws & PrinciplesManagement
In her Wall Street Journal bestselling 2019 book, ‘The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You’, Julie Zhuo writes:
Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
I’ve come to think of the multitude of tasks that fill up a manager’s day as sorting neatly into three buckets: purpose, people, and process.
Purpose
The purpose is the outcome your team is trying to accomplish, otherwise known as the why. Why do you wake up and choose to do this thing instead of the thousands of other things you could be doing? Why pour your time and energy into this particular goal with this particular group of people? What would be different about the world if your team were wildly successful? Everyone on the team should have a similar picture of why does our work matter? If this purpose is missing or unclear, then you may experience conflicts or mismatched expectations.
People
The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated to do great work?
Process
Finally, the last bucket is process, which describes how your team works together. You might have a superbly talented team with a very clear understanding of what the end goal is, but if it’s not apparent how everyone is supposed to work together or what the team’s values are, then even simple tasks can get enormously complicated. Who should do what by when? What principles should govern decision-making?
Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how. A great manager constantly asks herself how she can influence these levers to improve her team’s outcomes. As the team grows in size, it matters less and less how good she is personally at doing the work herself.
Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
This 'Design Leadership' section roughly orders resources for managers into these three buckets; Purpose, People and Process.
Books
Glossary
A growing list of categorised product design terms saved on Notion. Effective communication is crucial for success in all aspects of life, and having a strong technical vocabulary is particularly important in product design.
Resources
An extensive and growing list of resources relating to product design, development and business saved on Raindrop.
Know what to do, when to do it, and how to communicate your way through it with ProductDesignReference.com
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