I’ve been getting coached by an awesome Google Designer (Pt 1- Unpacking)

In October, I started working 1:1 with an amazing designer named Xander Pollock.

Xander is a badass.

He worked on Inbox by Gmail… and before that, he co-founded a company (Punchd) and sold it to Google.

Xander and I met through 500 Startups (he was in batch 1)

and he’s been teaching me about Google Venture’s process of UX design

GV has written about this process here, but it’s a whole different story to learn it directly from someone who has done this process with the GV team, who can customize the process just for you & can give you an accountability structure (which I need. Xander and I video chat once a week and I have homework).

So there are 5 steps in the process:

1. Unpack
2. Sketch
3. Decide
4. Prototype
5. Test

 

I’ve been applying these steps to the way I built Art Collecting School, which launches as part of the ‘test’ phase tomorrow.

The unpacking process was really fun.

• I got on the phone with a bunch of Kollecto users. We talked about art & what they wish they knew about art, but mainly we talked about non-art stuff: their favorite books, things they’re proud of, guilty pleasures, etc.

• I wrote personas for the 5 different types of users we have at Kollecto (I later built this into an art collecting lesson. See lesson #2 of Art Collecting School)

• I wrote a bunch of user stories for each of the personas

• I did a competitive analysis, mainly focusing on the cool things that MoMA, Sotheby’s, Christie’s & Museum Hack are doing in the art education space

• And I developed some clear KPIs I would use to measure success for Art Collecting School

And then I jumped into Part 2, Sketching, which was my favorite part!