To fulfill our vision/mission, we need the editor to feel very easy to use. They should feel right at home when they start using it, and they shouldn’t need any “tutorials” to use the product.
As Typedream grows, we'll continue to add features that might make the editor feel more complex and intimidating. Our job as the design team is to make sure Typedream stays simple, no matter how powerful it becomes and how much it grows.
User friendly
User experience is the biggest value that Typedream offers to our users. There's a lot of other website builders out there, and our differentiating factor is the editing experience.
Target User: People who can't code and have no design skill
Our Promise: We want to help these users to build beautiful & customized websites that fulfills their needs without needing to have coding/design skills
Every feature so click right in their heads, no tutorial necessary, they should be able to just start using a feature right off the bat.
How?
UX Research:
At the beginning of every big feature/product, we always start by finding a user's problem, interviewing them about the problem, after which we'll build a suitable solution in consideration to their background, skills, and needs.
After planning out a solution, we'll build a simple MVP and start doing UX research interviews, where we observe how users interact with the product
This informs us what's intuitive and what's not, what people tend to do and what people don't understand
Fix the design, fix the MVP product, release, UX interview with new update.
repeat!
Understand the target user and products their familiar with:
Generally, if we're targeting Notion users, then they're familiar with Notion. If we're targeting TikTok users, then they're familiar with TikTok, etc.
We always start off our design by building a UX that's familiar to our users
Most of the time, we won't have time to do a UX research, especially for smaller features, so we need to follow the products they are familiar with.
Copy other products:
There's no need to re-invent the wheel, especially since we want to make UX that the user is already familiar with.
Feel free to copy interactions, UI, and UX from other products, as long as it's consistent with the rest of the design
Example:
We copied Notion's editing experience with the / command for our editor
We copied Google Slides animation feature to allow users to add animations (just pick "Fade In", "Slide In", etc)
Workflow & working with the engineering team
The engineering team will be responsible for implementing your designs, so make sure to make things easy for them! Don't make designs that's impossible to build.
On every improvement or feature task in Linear, there will be an engineer assigned to build it. You need to work together with them to make a design that's easy to build and solves the issue that the improvement/feature is