Sakshi Jain
January 13, 2022
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5 min
When it comes to design, everyone has an opinion.
Design is pervasive. It makes for a shared experience that brings people together, whether in admiration or criticism.
So naturally, pleasing everyone is a task. Yet, better design comes from taking everyone together, actively seeking feedback, and being open to valuable suggestions.
If you are a designer or have worked with one as a developer or marketer, you would know how often links are shared back & forth to ensure good design turns to great and bad design never sees the light of the day.
With OSlash, this arduous process becomes simple; a lot more collaborative and seamless. All you would need to do is create these eight shortcuts.
- Bring your branding guidelines in one place with o/branding
When you think of Nike, Red Bull, Coca Cola, you immediately imagine everything they stand for. From their iconic logos to their taglines - these brands are etched in our minds.
And branding guidelines is the glue that makes them stick.
Keeping the branding guidelines handy - company logo, font, colors, imagery, tone etc. - is the only way to communicate the brand. Whether it’s for a new designer who has just joined, a third party you have outsourced work to, or your social media team that needs to create a post, having o/branding with all the parts that make up your identity is a great idea.
As a living document, o/branding would evolve as your brand does, and encapsulate all the updates that have been made over the years, available for everyone to access.
- Collect valuable feedback from your team with o/website-feedback
Website is the greatest real estate a company has for marketing which is why it is essential to involve the whole team in its creation.
At OSlash, we have figured out a super practical way of collecting website feedback from everyone in the company. From making design tweaks, correcting unintended typos, to incorporating suggestions for better UX, we have benefited a lot from assimilating everyone in the website creation process.
As a designer, create a Notion or Google doc OSlashed as o/website-feedback where everyone can write about their experience, issues, concerns, complaints, and appreciation for small efforts taken to pop the design. It gives you actionable insights into what people, who know your company and product well, think about the website.
- Simplify user onboarding experience with o/product-tour
Product tours/walkthroughs play an important role in familiarizing a new user with your product and its capabilities.
Every good designer needs to make sure that the tour does not drop the user in the middle of nowhere. When done well, a product tour would help a designer should improve UX, motivate users to take key actions, and shorten new users’ time to value—improving activation, conversion, and retention rates.
o/product-tour could direct the marketing, product, and design team towards the onboarding implementation in Intercom, Appcues, Product Fruits or the like. Here the designer can create a few mock versions and use analytics to regularly tweak the tour for optimization.
- Collaborate with the product managers using o/wireframes
A skeletal outline of the webpage, app, or product, wireframe usually represents the initial product concept with the styling, color, and graphics kept to a minimum.
While in startups, designers tend to design the screens directly in the interest of time, it is certainly not a good practice. Wireframes bring in clarity of thought while leaving room for everyone to deliberate on the feature in discussion.
Armed with the valuable insights gathered from the user feedback on o/wireframes, you can build on the next, more detailed iteration of the product’s design—such as the prototype or mockup.
Some great wireframing tools are Sketch, Balsamiq, JustinMind, and Adobe XD.
- Bring the wireframes to life in o/design collection
At OSlash, we absolutely cannot do without o/design collection.
In all enterprises, developers, designers, product managers, and marketers spend a lot of time sending links to one another. The back and forth with design links is tremendously frustrating, not to mention time-consuming, and perhaps what drove our co-founders to build OSlash.
With a collection o/design, you can nest different shortcuts such as o/design/onboarding-screens into a neat folder.
It would allow product managers and front-end developers to access the designs without troubling anyone for links.
- Collect user feedback on the designs with o/user-feedback
Design is an iterative process. One that gets better with each (valuable) feedback, suggestion, or tip.
With a single source of truth for all user feedback, o/user-feedback allows everyone from Sales, upper management, designers, marketers, and product managers to take down the notes from their research.
At OSlash we have created an Airtable to ensure no important feedback gets lost in conversations. As a product design lead, you can regularly consult o/user-feedback when brainstorming design iterations or future projects.
- Keep the marketing team on the same page with graphics in o/marketing-designs
Another favorite collection of ours is o/marketing-designs.
It allows us to collaborate with graphic designers in real-time on social media graphics, marketing collaterals, and blog assets.
Every time we don’t have to search or request the design link, we feel grateful for dogfeeding our product.
- Get a high-level overview of how your design project is progressing with o/design-pipeline
With so many designers (product and graphic) working together to elevate the brand, it sometimes becomes difficult to know who is working on what.
As good practice, it is advisable to create a spreadsheet to outline all design tasks with the DRI (directly responsible individual), status, and deadline.
This would help the whole team get a high-level overview of work in the coming months for better planning.
