Overview
There's a moment in every project where the brief becomes the actual work — when the idea you sold leadership turns into a hundred small choices about typography, latency, and which feature to drop. This page is the slow walk-through of one of those.
Written close to the time, edited a few weeks after, then again later. The work is always more interesting than the headline — the headline just gets you in the door.
Problem
Every product page begins with a sentence that's too tidy. "Users couldn't easily…" or "The team needed to…." The real problem is messier and usually older than the version that made it into the doc.
What follows is the version after the messy one. The one that still has the right shape.
Research
Interviews, then more interviews. Analytics that confirmed something I didn't want to be true. A small spreadsheet of competitor screens, mostly to convince myself we weren't reinventing the wheel.
Most of the answers were already in the room before research started. The research mostly told me which of them to trust.
Brainstorm
Whiteboard photos that don't make sense to anyone but me. Fifty variations of a layout that all looked similar enough to be the same one. A long Are.na board.
The good ideas almost always arrived as a sketch on a napkin, late, when I'd stopped trying.
Experimenting
Prototypes that worked for the demo and not for the use case. Prototypes that didn't survive the first usability session. A version that I was sure was the answer for about a week.
Each one taught me something about the next one. Iteration is the part of design that doesn't make it into the case study, usually.
Final Design
The version we shipped. Not the prettiest one. The one I could defend in a hallway conversation, point to a real user need, and explain in two sentences.
Some of the original idea survived. Most of it didn't. That's usually how this goes.