A year ago today, I began designing Kin. It’s easily the most involved, complex, and robust project of my career. Our team designed the application, the brand, the marketing website, assorted print collateral, banner ads; art directed multiple photoshoots; co-produced four videos and much more. As I look back on all this work and the past year, a handful of lessons stand out.
1) Find the brand by getting to know the product.
When I first started designing Kin, the goal was just to provide enough runway for the development team to continue building the application. Despite what design school thought, Step 1 wasn’t creating a cool logo and a brand standards guide. By the time we got around to designing the brand identity four months later, we had four more months of conversation about Kin under our belt, a lot of UI design decisions made, and we felt like we were starting to get to know Kin’s personality and quirks. The identity design still took a lot of effort, but it came together in a way that felt natural and right for our product because we didn’t force or rush it.
2) Feature-based Design < System-based Design
Tactically, our team approached the design of the Kin UI on a feature by feature basis. We’d spend a week or two working on the Files portion of the app, and then move on to the Onboarding section, then Tasks, etc. Now this worked on a getting-things-done level, however, it’s left a bit of a hodgepodge, case-by-case-basis impact on the UI. Since the initial release in July, we’ve been improving our designs to make them more systematic and consistent across the entire app and less arbitrary.
As we move forward with the UI design we’re thinking less about specific features and more about establishing, refining, and carefully adding to a design language. We find ourselves asking, “How have we previously solved this problem or a problem like it?” Often times, the best answer for new design challenges is a design pattern we’re already using elsewhere.
3) Design actually is a differentiator.
We hypothesized that design, both visual and user experience, would help differentiate Kin from the competition. Many designers assume if it’s the pretty option within an ugly field people will come running. I’d say we hoped that’d be true, but it was still a gamble. I mean the HR-space doesn’t have a history of being particularly visually-discerning. But five months after our public release, we can affirm with confidence design is a key differentiator between us and our competitors. While we work toward feature parity, we find that our customers come to use Kin for it’s simplicity of use, attention to detail, and visual beauty.
Our hope was that the discipline, craft, and thinking we poured into the design would somehow translate tangibly to the end users. And to our immense joy, it seems to have. Plus, we’re finding that the same people that care about design are often the same ones who care about designing better workplaces for their employees.
4) Designing an app is a lot easier than designing a business.
I had hoped when we released Kin in July, we’d be greeted with the warm embrace of the market, quickly come to dominate all competition, and enjoy all the spoils of winning. It turns out designing an app is a lot easier than designing a profitable, self-sustaining business. We learned a lot about designing user interfaces and product design in the first half of 2013. Now we’re learning even more about optimizing for product market fit, A/B testing, sales, and content strategy.
Designing a great product was a big step. But we’re working to design a successful and thriving business by getting Kin into the hands of more companies that will love it.
The Next Year of Designing Kin
2013 has been a great year for our small, but mighty, product design team. The public release in July was a major milestone, but it wasn’t a finish line. I often like to think of Kin now as the ugliest, dumbest, worst designed version in a long and steady line of iteration and improvement. But when I look back on other more famous version 1.0 releases, I feel pretty satisfied with what we’ve accomplished thus far. Yet, any satisfaction is short-lived because I know how much work remains. I can’t wait to see what 2014 holds for Kin, our team, and most importantly our users, and I can’t wait for you to see it too.