Written by Yu Jing

Senior Product Designer in Product & Design Team, Ninja Van

Summary:

A product designer’s hustle is commonly recognised as being able to deliver big releases or launch features that hopefully bring in revenue for the business. However, being able to spot and grab opportunities to conduct quick validation tests is also an important strategic skill. Rapid validation exercises that are executed opportunistically, help increase the chances of new product releases to meet users’ needs identified through earlier studies. This in turn helps to meet organisational goals faster. However, more often than not, efforts in these tests go unnoticed even though they make or break the product’s perceived usability.

In this article:

1. Introduction: The design problem at hand
2. The opportunity for quick research
3. Setting the stage for success
4. Preparing the research tools and people
5. Diving into guerrilla usability testing
6. The insights and learnings
7. Iterating and testing with real users
8. Reflection

I’m going to show you a behind-the-screens moment in a typical-ish day as a product designer in Ninja Van. Take a glimpse at our process, where we opportunistically ran quick tests whilst juggling with tight timelines for a major release 🤹.

Introduction: The design problem at hand

As the company grew, we found ourselves overly submerged in the hustle and bustle of designing for complex problems with little time for testing existing solutions. One example is how we needed to adapt an existing core feature - the air waybill. The design problem is that we needed to accommodate additional functional information in a small real estate. On top of that, we only had 1 week to settle on the design recommendations.