"UI Stack" entries

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Design Podcast, our podcast exploring how experience design—and experience designers—are shaping business, the Internet of Things, and other domains: Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Scott Hurff, product manager and lead designer at Tinder, Inc. Hurff is the author of Designing Products People Love. In this episode, we talk about how Tinder approaches design, avoiding awkward UI, and why customer research is the most important skill for future designers.

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

Questions of structure

At Tinder, the product team is about five people, six people. What’s interesting is that we’re trying to grow really quickly. There’s a give and take on how we divide up product design responsibilities and product management responsibilities. There is a lot of engineering talent here, and they need a lot of product to work on. It’s a matter of, how do we structure ourselves so we can give them thought-through, packaged-up, ready-to-go ideas and concepts while still hammering out the details in time.

Design as a full-contact sport

Design is such a part of the Tinder experience. It may not seem like that’s the case because it’s such a simple app, but that’s only because everything goes through this distillation process. You have to really fight for real estate and your idea. Design’s really a full-contact sport here. You have to bring in all the big guns to make your case. Sometimes these can be really long debates, but they’re good; they’re healthy. They get the ideas out on the table, and a lot of times, design really has to be put through its bases to prove itself.

Read more…