Talking with Nádia Ferreira: UX team of one at Take Eat Easy
We were honored to have Nádia Ferreira, a Portuguese UX designer, as the first speaker of our Umami Design Talk series. Nádia has worked at large corporations (such as Sony and Philips), start-ups and design agencies. Today, she is the only user experience (UX) designer at Take Eat Easy. This Belgian start-up launched an app allowing people to order food from a wide variety of restaurants and have it delivered to them by a courier on a bicycle. Since its 2013 début, the food-delivery service has been so successful that some of its partner restaurants have had to expand their kitchens to accommodate all the additional orders.
The Central team invited Nádia to talk about her experience as Take Eat Easy’s UX designer. The resulting interview is full of handy tips for designers, aspiring start-up employees and anyone who regularly does group-work. You can read below the (slightly shortened) written version of the chat or you can watch the full interview on periscope.
What fills your day at Take Eat Easy?
As a UX team of one, I’m basically trying to understand the company’s business needs. Take Eat Easy grew very, very fast. We now have 60 to 80 employees in Brussels, with offices in France, Spain and in the UK. As a UX team of one I have to understand the company’s product vision. I basically transform that into intuitive user flows for websites, mobile applications and so on. To do this, I work closely with Isabelle, our UI graphic designer, and with android developers, iOS developers, and back-end developers.
“If you want to join Take Eat Easy, be a food addict because we eat from our restaurants every day.”
You mentioned you’re the only UX designer at Take Eat Easy. What are the biggest challenges of being a UX team of one?
The main challenge is the discussion of ideas. I don’t like to work alone because my head is always full of potential solutions and I need someone to ping-pong ideas with. I need another devil’s advocate that says ‘Okay, if we use solution A, those are the consequences…’ Isabelle has been my ping-pong partner.
Another challenge is to understand where certain requests come from. Sometimes product owners tell me ‘You should do this’ and I say ‘Why? Why should I do it like that?’ They frequently give me the solution before I make any wireframes [a sketch of a digital interface]. But I’m not here just to do wireframes. That’s not the point. So I go and challenge them. I ask them what problem they’re trying to solve, how many people they think it will have an impact on, what target group they want to reach, and what vision they have in mind. You can be very, very detailed (thinking about what a specific drop-down does etc.), but if you take a step back and think at an abstract level in terms and goals and vision, it can give you more ideas and more background for your implementation.
When a start-up begins building a design team, it probably means that most of its staff has never worked with designers before. How do you create design processes in such an environment?
That’s an interesting question. To put these processes together, you have to be passionate about design and about your company.
At first, we started with an ad hoc process just to try it out. Then we realized we needed some check-in points. This means we regularly meet with the VP Brand and VP Product who tell us their vision so that we can transform it into something tangible.
We also do what I like to call reality checks during which we meet with developers to see if there are quicker and better ways to do stuff and if our ideas are implementable. And in the end, the design team ends up being an interface between the business needs and the implementation.
Regarding how designers bring people together, I was thinking about it the other day and I remembered how at one point everyone thought all designers should learn how to code. When this trend came up, I started learning some HTML and some CSS in order to do some interactive prototypes. But then I realized that it was only useful in certain contexts. At Take Eat Easy I started out with interactive prototypes, animations and so on, but after a while, I went back to paper. I went back to quick sketches and printed wireframes so that during meetings, people could go ‘No, not this!’ or ‘Yes, this!’ and have the feeling that it wasn’t finished, that we were still iterating. And when I go into those meetings, I actually say this:
‘My work is disposable.’
You recently launched the new Take Eat Easy mobile app for iPhone and Android. How did that go?
When we finished the design and all the assets, I thought, ‘How about testing this to see if it works.’ As a UX team of one, I had to go through the process of explaining what a usability test was and how important it was to talk to the end-user to get some good feedback. I said ‘Look, if we do this, it’s going to help us prioritize what to do next. And it’s going to help us avoid building useless stuff.’
So this week is my second week of usability tests and I’ve seen about 15 users of Android and iOS devices. I talked to them for an hour about how they choose their restaurants. I didn’t write a 50-page report or anything — that’s not what I’m looking for — but this afternoon I had a brainstorming session to try to prioritize all the problems identified and determine what’s really needed.
“When you work in-house, you can really see the whole production process. From first idea to built product. That’s great!”
How do you go about making your day productive?
I feel quite frustrated in front of a blank computer screen so I always start with some sketching. I try to see what could go wrong and what could go well. So once again, disposable work; I throw it away and start again. I’m a paper lady for the first iteration of a project (in fact, I already got a remark from the office manager saying that I consumed a lot of paper). Then, I put my headphones on and I start designing in Sketch and InVision.
I also use sketchnotes. I’m a big fan of them. I started taking notes visually before I knew sketchnotes were even a thing. Actually, it’s just a way of transforming words and concepts into images. I think it really helps to make sure everyone agrees. I can say something to you and you can interpret it in a totally different way, even though we can have the feeling that we all agree.
During meetings, for example, I sketch what people say. And then someone can say ‘Oh I didn’t say that. Are you sure that’s what we all meant?’ And then we can point to what needs to be changed, and erase, and draw again. It’s a way to put people on the same page. I know it’s frustrating to leave the meeting room saying ‘Great, we are going to do that’ and then end up with a conflict 2 weeks later because people didn’t understand each other.
What tips would you give to someone who wants to join a start-up?
- Don’t be afraid to put your ideas on the table because that’s what you’re there for.
- Don’t be afraid to start something new.
- Your work is not on a golden plate. Your work should be disposable because by definition, a start-up is still testing its concept and trying to see if everything that it’s doing is actually correct and worth it.
- And be very, very energetic. Nobody is going to tell you to do this by this time. You definitely need to be proactive.
- To young designers I would say: Look, listen and try.
If you’d like to come to our next Umami Design Talk, just sign up on Meetup. It will take place at Central, our design studio in Brussels, where we use design sprints to get businesses’ and organizations’ digital products off the ground in no time. If you’re not in Brussels, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out how to live-stream the event.
