TLDR – Leaving Ricardo.ch
New year, new job and new User Experience challenges.
Yesterday was my last day at Ricardo AG.
In the last couple of years, my colleagues and I have worked to design the user experience for the responsive versions of ricardo.ch and autoricardo.ch. My role was leading this project in terms of UX. It was a great chance and a massive collection of challenges.
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What were the main topics that we faced during this project?
What keeps users engaged with your products?
When you design for an e-commerce (it does not matter if it is a B2B, B2C, etc.) platform, you need to take care of a long list of needs. You have to merge business, user and stakeholders’ needs. Understanding the user behaviours is a “must have” and a daily task for the User eXperience guy (or girl). It is clear enough that it is impossible to control the user journey anymore. In the e-commerce environment never the less. Understing user needs and behaviours can open a new vision to design products. At the same time, the iterative testing phase is crucial. It’s a focal point to boost during the product design process. It’s essential to deliver fast to test qualitatively and quantitatively. Do not stop with a single test and evaluation; iterate them and try different solutions.
How do we evangelize the user experience design process?
I hopped in and off several design teams. At Ricardo, it was different because it was easy for me to get involved in the product design process from the beginning. What was challenging was the set-up of the UX process itself. As a UX designer, I was involved in the planning and the execution phase. This task was quite tough because I had to handle many dependencies between product, management and IT requests. I learned how to prioritize topics, manage parallel tasks, and say no to people. This is, for me, the real meaning of “UX evangelization” in a company. It’s an internal/intimate UX between the design team and the stakeholders.
What scares stakeholders from pushing new features/products?
I learned that the “go live” fear can slow the process and create many issues. I found out that you can quickly decrease (or delete) this fear by asking users what they want or need. The feedback that you will collect can give you a new way to think and design your product and your strategy. The user journey related to the main features, for instance, must be checked and steadily evaluated every time we think about a new feature. How the user accesses the features can be very different; asking about behaviours and routines can improve the UI performance. Checking all these topics can help the team think correctly about designing the next feature.
How do you manage a lack of time/resources?
These two topics are overwhelming. I learned that the more time you spend thinking, drawing, designing, testing and re-doing everything in loops, the less chance of errors you will have when the product is live. Time and effort are essential. This is why a correct approach and a realistic vision are important to deliver good products. I learned the importance of saying no with many real reasons and fundamental justifications. I learned to appreciate the value of the MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) approach. This approach can be a good way to evaluate ideas, concepts and solutions.
What I will bring with me in the next experience:
Learnings from the people I worked with
The most important part of my experience is related to humans. I learned to interact with people from different cultures and countries. I want to focus on increasing these skills. Interacting with people of different behaviours and backgrounds is fascinating and engaging.
Environment and attitude
Work hard and play hard, viagra kaufen online. This quote is a masterpiece for my next experience. Sharing tough and funny moments with the guys you work with is important. It is a great way to get to know each other better. Increasing the team spirit can be productive in terms of fresh ideas and new solutions.
Processes and flows
Mobile-first and User-centred Design has been essential for my work since I started at Ricardo. I genuinely believe that this is the best combo to improve the UX for e-commerce products. Especially in Switzerland because the Swiss market is full of opportunities for platforms like ricardo.ch. The user base owns the latest version of the most powerful devices. They browse the web with one of the best connections available in Europe and are used to buying (and selling) goods and services on the internet. The UX has fewer technical constraints, but user expectations are very high and complex.
The importance of the data
Reading and understanding analytics data is another important task for a UX. Increasing the know-how about tools, metrics, and goals data-based can boost the UX process in terms of performance and user satisfaction. I want to improve my attitude toward using data to paint out personas, scenarios and behaviours. Managing these topics with data support can be very profitable for the project. Using data is a good start to having the big picture in your mind. This can be a significant leverage when sharing UX topics with stakeholders.
I wish this company all the best. I firmly believe that it will remain the best marketplace in Switzerland. I am sure that people working in ricardo will always ensure customers a simple and exciting e-commerce experience.
Live long and prosper!