I switched to a low definition version after collecting feedback. Eventually we would need metrics to assess what should be displayed and rank the position on the screen.
Lesson learned after all these years:
Designing Products at the intersection of people and technology leads to skills in relationship building within your own company.
My journey into Product Design started at the MIT Media Lab, pushing the boundaries of human interaction as the web was taking off, in an increasingly digital world, from screens to interconnected objects. My passion at the time was to rethink the video reporting, and enabling a fluid relationship in news story with various perspectives and opinions (quite timely now!)
I moved into tailoring experiences on large content sites (like the Wine Spectator) to experimenting with conversation design to – in the last 10 years – designing for large Saas Plaform data intensive applications, customized to individual users, often involving complex flows, and the necessity to help people be productive while juggling a variety of tools.
All of which has led me to practice – and strategize – end-to-end, all aspects of the design cycle from discovery, research and validation, low and high fidelity prototypes, through various deployment cycles.
Each new feature or product led to learning first hand the nuances of what needs to be prioritized according to multiple criteria (usability, business value, cost, feasibility, among others). This implied learning how to join conversations defining product strategy and learning how those decisions are made – and why – to eventually how a design team can add value (and not everyone wants to see).
It means developing trust and relationships, finding allies and understanding various stakeholders' goals and challenges, how to partner on shared objectives. For instance, I recall how, as a Design Manager, I once joined forces with the head of Customer Success in our quest for analytics. We both needed it, but for different reasons: both teams had a vested interest in measuring feature adoption.
