Iterative Design Done Right: Insights and Tips from Wealthsimple’s Design Director

Tom Creighton is a hands-on kind of design director. As head of UX for Wealthsimple, an online investment management service, he believes in the power of iterative design to build and release features on his company’s apps, across multiple devices. It’s an approach that has served him well in his career, as he’s “ping-ponged” from tech startups to agencies and back again, leading teams in building successful digital products.

We asked why he’s such a advocate of the iterative design approach, and asked him to share some of his tips for UX designers who want to work more iteratively in their own careers.

What’s the best approach to iterative design?

First, you need an organization that’s going to support it. One that’s cognizant that we can only bite off so much at a time, and to do more just means it’s going to suffer. My second point is that you have to have a very specific and non-yielding bar for what you actually put in place before you release it.

We need to be very aware of the amount of work we can realistically design, build, and launch in a given amount of time. Because we are aware of that, and we don’t always try to boil the ocean on every single project, it allows us to be more sensitive to the scope of what we’re actually launching.

How have you done this at Wealthsimple?

A great example of this is our referrals feature. For a long time it was within the product, but hadn’t received the same amount of design thinking and love that some of the other parts of the product had gotten. We knew, in many ways, we didn’t have enough data to to go all out on a splashy launch just for referrals, but we could launch smaller pieces and ‘make smaller bets’ about how this was going to work, how people were going to react to it, and the kinds of things people were wanting to do.

Because we’re taking a more bite-size approach, we are able to course-correct, see what the data is telling us, and what actual behavior is. In my mind that’s what the actually benefit of iterative design is. You can launch something that’s still great since there’s still a quality bar to meet, and use it not just as a feature but also as a learning experience.

We put something out to market, just on referrals, just on mobile, and looked at what people were doing with it. At the same time, we were working on the web version of the same feature, but some of our learnings about people’s behaviors on mobile were folded back into that.

If we had launched all at once, we would have missed some of the nuance having that staggered approach allowed us to capture.

How do you know when an iteration is ready to be released?

You have to set the bar internally and say, when we’ve covered off these features, we’ll launch. You need to be sensitive to what the ‘minimally awesome’ version of a given feature is that you can actually get out the door, that actually does everything you want it to do. It’s not about building in all the bells and whistles, it’s about holding some things in reserve until we see what the MVP does in the real world.

What do you do when one of your iterations doesn’t work or perform as expected?

I think one of the nice things about working in a very product-focused organization, is there is this tacit permission that, everything is a learning opportunity. The great thing about digital products is we can just ship continuously, nothing is ever set in stone. Within a month of launching our referrals feature, for example, we blew it up, redesigned the dashboard, thought deeper about the interaction patterns based on what we had seen, and relaunched it. By doing that, it’s working considerably better.

Patrick Faller is a freelance writer, digital producer, journalist, and TV host. His background is news, but he has a passion for music, video games, and that special place where art and technology collide.

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Originally published at theblog.adobe.com