# Designing before building - Find out if you're building the right thing for users before...

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 23:56
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-TcZpkmw5ABU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcZpkmw5ABU

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/designing-before-building-find-out-if-youre-building-the-right-thing-for-users-before-you-start-to-build

Blockchain development takes longer than Web2 product iteration cycles. This means teams don’t know if they’re building something users want until after a costly and time consuming development cycle. We use Design Sprints to prototype, test and learn from real user feedback — fast. Bringing product design methodologies to Dapps and DeFi developers.
At Deep Work Studio, we've used the Design Sprint process to find out if a product is worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort, or if the value proposition is really valid. With teams from ConsenSys, Molecule, Wyre, Hummingbot, Ramp, Pillar and more. In this talk, we'll talk through the process. Showing how any team can design, prototype and test a product within a few days. 
Too often we've seen extensively build products launch to little user or market need. At the end of the talk, teams will have insights on how they can: 
- Validate products and features before a costly building phase.
- Increase speed to market.
- Increase chances of product success.
With real user feedback in days not years!

Speaker(s): Charlie Ellington, Andrej Ktitarev
Skill level: Beginner
Track: UX & Design


Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Applause] we're here to talk about designing before you build products and just before kickoff and who here is a designer just sure answer well there's more who here has worked with the design okay cool that's pretty much everyone so everyone knows the experience that's pretty good tonight my name is Charlie I'm going to talk about the current state of design and what's currently happening with them clock check out the patience for design and awkwardly wander it gets to talk about a exciting new future this time the better job here these are some of the companies that we've worked with but this show is mainly about you guys it's not us and the reason you're the best is because you're building pretty incredible has developed this technical infrastructure I don't really understand this but it's pretty cool and there's numbers which are really starting to show through at the same time too and with the infrastructure there's also techniques and methodologies from web 2.0 which means that we can really quickly build quite amazing products on top of it and we all know that we build things faster better and cheaper companies like Spotify a competition with Google Amazon and Apple and they're building significantly better products and our competition is in the slower and maybe something's room might be doing that the only thing is is that my expectations of where we want to be or kind of a linear scale where we should be going a little bit faster but we obviously were probably somewhere underneath that and I'm very impressed with where products are at the moment the reality is is that when you have 10 innovation is an exponential curve hopefully we're going to end up somewhere up there and we don't know where that is if we looked at the app store launch we have no idea that apps like uber and airbnb would be the ones that be most successful so these these are the timeit's of these companies to get to a 1 billion dollar market cap so generally what happens in technology these things are just getting faster and faster and that's when disruption comes in so why is disruption not happening applications in thinset gorgeous web 2.0 have really great user experience and they're a pleasure to use but the same sign that not that technology innovative their users of apps kind of speaks for itself especially but it against traditional FinTech apps six million users of Robin 13 head to 20,000 a users of aphelion taps if we do a Google search that best apps things look incredibly exciting in doing research adapts we're asking who is still alive and I kind of understand why and whether the question of losing and users photos on social media is actually more valuable compared to losing somebody's money is a conversation for another day but you are building things which have small contracts which have value which you don't want to lose so this methodology doesn't necessarily work and what it means is there are additional e to get a product out or to validate an idea you go from the idea you build you launch you get data and you've ever dated and it works but in web 3.0 that process is significantly longer you want to think about token economics while it's integration smart contract security governance with its test they're listed on for quite a long time before you actually watch then only then you get the tensor and in events you validate with be my date works and yeah what change starts a little bit more like this we've got a process which takes an idea gets data and validates it as possible okay nice to meet you so yeah let me go through a couple of tools and things that we've discovered or that we found to make this happen who knows oh yeah this could be you who knows this guy okay you know personally he wrote this book who knows this book okay good nice then I don't have to oh this is basically the fundamentals of what order like the beginning of what I'm gonna talk about it in a minute because that's where I guess all the process started that we have developed by now it came out in 2007 2016 so actually only three years ago and we've been working in exclusively design sprints to kind of work on them and make them as efficient as possible and this is basically what it's about it's shortcutting all this process into just having an idea or maybe not even having and real-life data before you actually like have to implement stuff says like super rapid process it works like and it's basically just a structure for innovation in any type of industry for any type of product it's broken down and the most essential steps of any product or any product development should have which is ideation which is map so basically the whole team Alliance on the on a concept or on idea then everybody sketches out what it's actually supposed to be then you decide on what you want to build build a prototype and then you test the prototype and then you have the whole cycle that you can do it again and again or you just also developed it at some point and all of this leads to basically solving a lot of questions select is that actually is the product actually understandable for people like this is another thing that we built it for consensus that got presented yesterday and we need to figure out whether people understand the whole transition from eve from the current state of East a zero to phase two and would actually invest in statement into the 2.0 platform to figure out whether you're developing the right thing at all this was coming but they only had a CLI interface yeah a command-line interface so they knew that they just creating bots that people could run to get both best traits but they didn't know whether people would actually need a proper interface and play around with it they ended up not building it because they require ties but they learned that the actual demand exists or molecule they had this is probably one of the most complicated like systems that we worked on which is basically revolutionizing the entire medical industry which is huge task it's gonna take a lot of years but we built it we figured out how it could work we found out that it's going to take a lot of time and now they kind of know exactly the roadmap or at least more or less the roadmap which tests that they should make in order to make this a reality soon and yeah also like you know finding the best way to actually market a product and you can do this actually of yeah okay he said we already know that book for those who don't know the book how long do you think that all of these products took approximately so like the all of them took approximately the same amount of time as a product that I've just shown and it's like a prototype that's like several screens I don't know if you would say like any time scale from like one hour to I don't know a year each month six months three months three months okay who is more who's who's less what are you saying take good what I said okay okay okay you want something here yes so basically all of these things take only one week after one week you have a lot of data and since actually so much data that a lot of teams don't really know how to actually use that because it's so much and basically by the time by the end of the week we normally start off either another iteration week so we figure out exactly what needs to be built and by then they are able to basically ship it or like implemented ship it or yeah well they find out exactly what they need to do this is super short amount of time the only problem is the port was I would say Jake wrote this book and he was like this is all main office structure because you need to have people in and in the room they need to put them all together so they work in like yeah enclosed rooms that they understand social interactions among each other so they understand how everybody works and he was like Andre this is not gonna work remotely I'm like let me try and yeah because the the whole blockchain industry is completely split up we have a centralized greatest by nature like and we have to figure out a way how to connect listen so far I'm not charlie yeah so I live in IB fur in Spain and I'm always been nervous saying that because the typical emission comes to people's heads is something like that I haven't been to one of these in about two years just to give you an idea the real reason I live there is because it's absolutely beautiful where they've outdoors and it's all about prioritizing for me health and being opposing being fit now the problem with that is that skills and etherium are spread out around the world like the best developers the best technology isn't on the worlds of party capital last year I met Andre at Def Con and he said hey I've got a process which takes creative work and you can do it remotely as a bit skeptical I used to work for a start-up and we tried to work remotely and what we found is that the constant pivots the constant changes you had to make you had to talk across time zones it was just didn't work he couldn't move fast enough to actually disrupt the competition so yeah and going back to this process oh yeah we wanted to work with a lot of compactness processes basically explode up in five days I mean kind of make sense know what you know by now so every single day in the book is is one of these steps and that was the original design sprint from 2016 which is already pretty impressive but every day takes a long time so what we did was basically like in the last three years shorten it down to four days split it up split the collaborative sessions into approximately three hour sessions per bit so it would be like deciding on what you want to build in like about three hours sketching out individual solutions in about two hours together deciding on what which of these elements are make the most sense and then storyboard it all together and pack the best ideas into one thing so that all of these things that are actually meet to happen like collaboratively were bashed into much much shorter amounts of time and the other ones we could just do a lonely prototyping I can just sit down relax charlie can sit down for a day I just do it Michael oh here's a testing you can also do it late in one day and one person but the point is that all of this structure made possible to kind of split it up and make it usable across all the different time zones so this is actually a project that was actually the calculator I think it was different completely different time zones and it just works because people get up at different times obviously there's a couple of sacrifices as some people might want to get up earlier or you know work until a little bit later but I mean we are in the world that's that's evolving and we're redefining the way we work and they were the the what is it nine to five jobs are not a sustainable thing anyway so I think this is a progression towards that in an area in the creative area which is normally unquantifiable but we can make it work if we apply the right structure yeah and we already of the basic guidelines for that we already have the infrastructure obviously this is just joke with with these are the tools the main tools already exist and they're super user-friendly they work just combine them together to replace the natural office interactions with remote collaboration tools and you have it you can you can work for on whatever you like and super short amount of time so we want to work we have work remotely like how to get the right people solving problems and theorem in particular I feel relaxed expertise cross sectional I'm glad to see this design isn't agreeing I know that straight up to this chair movements doing its work downstairs cause when more than your debts that's pretty cool I really want that to happen but we also need 1 million devs and a million other people as well at different skills to come in and I can understand it with designers because what typically happens in the relationship is you understand the technical problem that you need somebody with design skills so you give them a brief and they go away with their skills to design something like an interface or a solution and the end result is they come back with something and you have to give them this which is feedback and nobody really enjoys that process it's not very nice and I think the primary reason that happens is because like designers tend to try and solve a problem that don't really understand the people who actually understand it the developers themselves so the design spirit processes climates it everybody who comes into the process the design solutions together so when a designer brings in their skills they're only bringing in the city skills not stuff they don't understand so and the basic structure is actually just this you have a team of people who all at the same time with zero discussion actually kind of counterintuitive so you don't actually talk in all this process so you only write down things is that the first bit everybody writes their own thoughts and ideas into one space then you move over and that's like tiny pressure like time box reporting everybody votes on the things that they think are the best so almost like you can imagine that like a dowel or something like a mini Dow you know you everybody suggests ideas and then everybody at the same time votes on them and then you prioritize because they were credibly you understand what's the best feeling in the room and if the if you think that if most people think that one idea or concept of solution is the most important one to go for then that's probably the best to go for for now and so you can do that with with obviously with text or solutions to problem such a write out but he goes through a lot of sketches so this is actually from the swimming but example where everybody individually and that was project money see to us through a concept on paper what the interface should look like our immersion from our personal perspective and I noticed the super super small way this thoughts like little red dots on to vote on the most important ideas and all of these is heat map leads to us create this storyboard based on all the best ideas from the scales were close I don't know if you can see the monistic a lot of tiny red dots scattered across so there's a lot of different roles that can combined from everybody's perspective so you only get the most valuable information for the best goal that everybody's working for from the experts so yeah and then you're basically finished with a storyboard okay so this is on the bottom then you finish with the storyboard that's precisely exactly what you want to build because it has exactly the words exactly the buttons exactly interface you would like to fill so there's no back and forth between you and the designer or or between between the designer and product manager or you know you don't go a linear process anymore you just do it all together and everything is super clear so that we can just go in and prototype this thing in one day by prioritizing the most important things and just build it a figment and if we had two people who working even better than when frost ever can make it look even prettier this is an example from them for mommy book and it looks like your actual interface this is probably not the biggest work of art but it's a prototype that looks like the real thing and if you show that to someone who's never seen that thing before they'll be like how do I use that let's start clicking around that's exactly what you want you want people to believe that that's the real thing so they can gather actual valuable data and it's that leads us to the user testing so that's how basically oh yeah sorry that's that's cool so user testing and it's kind of not done so much in the statements like this which kind of explain why maybe you're a founder it kind of think say for example with blockchain technology if you asked people what they wanted from that Bank it wouldn't necessarily come up with my one in a theory of wallet what stable points and that runs through things like Steve Jobs it's not the customers job to know what they want problem is is that at the moment in a space where just high-fiving each other with what we think is cool does anybody know what this actually is smell freedom to take some of this balls from like a web community where you start up this guy's program from Y Combinator what tends happen to space is his strokes to use against which is big launches actually tends to happen people go away build products they launch it into space and it actually gets great feedback everyone's like wow that's so cool and it starts to get some initial contraction in the community the problem with that is it never moves outside the community so what we want to do in user testing is actually ask real people who are going to be the end user what they think how we can improve and iterate slowly as low as possible and if we don't do that what we do is we end up building products which have loads of teachers and we have no idea of users are actually gonna love them in it that's what I can see in a lot of progress and that's where my attention drama that goes first I see products in the spaces that we working on technology it's amazing yes we know we can do a lot of different things let's just put them all in to this app and then like so what is that then Frankenstein monster or something so with the user testing you know exactly you can just show all of these features that you think are good or not good or whatever you can kind of came up with show it to them and oh we're almost done and you basically basically that way you you understand what what people resonate to and what they don't care at all about and they know how to prioritize stuff this is just a screenshot of how it works and super easy just do it with five people that's enough normally for is also enough that you can see already the overlaps of what they think about this whole thing so like you have that so summary you get unstuck if you're stuck you align your team on the common goal I mean you can also do this he can actually use it deeply so that's also quite another which is the only next real step is actually shipping the product so this is the closest you can get to understanding your your target audience and it's it's real because they think it's real and you're really quickly learned if that's actually what the people want and that's super important before you lay before you implement it before you put a lot of money into it and make it yeah so yeah this is one of the final slides we basically put together all the tools we need or you need sorry the only twist we found all the books articles there's one exercise that you can try which takes an hour it's super cool we use in every week in our own tennis studio so it's almost like a retrospective or you get to it wasn't this process that I showed you like the three step one so basically like you come up with problems in the team you come up with solutions to the problems in the team and you just delegate it takes one hour solves all your problems really and also like yeah just a lot of books that are nice some articles yeah like that or ask us later one more thing sorry I think I have one more okay so this is one more thing that I actually find personally pretty fascinating just anyone right now I'm almost done so this is one thing that I find very fascinating because I've been working on these things for three years and I know that I can know the structure and I think this can go all pretty much first of all obviously we can solve a lot of problems and products we have this space we have that problem in the block chance visit for you to make the products we use are both focused we need to get expertise to work together on one thing so this can be applied to every of your products and make it like really amazing in a very short time but what if we solve problems that are unrelated to to product design we can do exactly the same process we can think about how we can use a network with different expertise to solve problems that are not actually just building a product but maybe solving problems with governance something that it's like not having like whether the result is not an interface or a product but actually something that's a more fundamental process solution to a problem or things like creating cures for undiagnosable health diseases we actually did that two months ago with a team of different experts and had a patient just work on on their health as having different people to work on one thing at the same time instead of talk to the doctor or maybe you know at some point your preventative climate change but yeah either way whatever your problem is this is like I think this is one of the most fantastic processes of principal subject should apply to your work you're all problem solvers I love you all whoa because anything remotely and everything and people love your products to buy [Applause] you